Creative industries, spatiality and flexibility: The example of film production

At the beginning of the 1990s, film production in Sweden was heavily centralised in Stockholm. Today, film production in Sweden has decentralised to include three regional film production centres located far from the capital region. The article aims to understand this decentralised location pattern, focusing on the aspects of flexible film work and film workers. The implications of the regionalisation of film production in Sweden for film workers and for regions are explored. Labour and work practice flexibility create important conceptual lenses through which the investigation and analysis were developed. The major empirical source of data was a questionnaire survey of film workers. From the empirical data, different structures of the film industry in the main film regions are discussed. The results show that the geography of film workers diverges from that of film work, reflecting spatial mobility among film workers and willingness to be involved in projects some distance from their county of residence. Multiscalar relations in film work and film projects appear to be the organisational norm within film production. The results also show that it is difficult to generate sufficient income from film production, and most workers are dependent on incomes from sectors outside the film industry.