The premise of Jordbundna sounds familiar until its most ordinary assumption becomes the problem. Earth is no longer habitable. An ark will take a selected few away. Max is not among them. The question that pushes Baker Karim’s short film beyond a disaster story is not whether the ship can fly. It is who was permitted to leave.
The Swedish public broadcaster’s description of the film gives this much of the story: a dying planet, a small group chosen for interplanetary escape and a man determined to board at any cost. An earlier announcement from the Swedish Film Institute locates the action in Kiruna in 2121 and adds a more disturbing assertion. The selection was said to be fair. The supposed best representatives of humanity would be saved. That phrase does an extraordinary amount of dramatic work. Before Max reaches the ark, a system has already decided whose future counts.
Karim has described the film as Afrofuturist. In the Film Institute announcement, he argued that the perspective shifts assumptions that conventional Western science fiction can let pass without scrutiny. In a later interview with Heba Habib for Lyktan, he sharpened the point. The spacecraft that carries humanity to safety is such a settled image that a viewer can overlook the people who control it. Seen from his position as a Black person in Sweden, the convention provoked a different question: who chose its passengers? The story begins where the genre’s reassuring account of survival becomes an argument about exclusion.
It matters that the film is short. SVT lists Jordbundna, also called Earthbound, at ten minutes. A feature could follow the entire structure of an imagined selection authority, the engineering of the ship and the lives of everyone left behind. Karim’s project instead compresses those pressures into a single decision about access. A person wants to cross a boundary that has been drawn against him. The premise turns an abstraction, the distribution of a future, into a cinematic objective. Max needs to reach a place. The audience need not be given a political lecture to grasp what the place represents.
The vessel has a long life in popular science fiction. Karim changes the position from which a viewer approaches it. Where other escape stories may invite identification with the departing few, the title and premise keep attention on someone left below. That change of position makes the ark’s familiar promise of survival newly uneasy.
The future has an admissions policy
The ark is an elegant device because it appears to answer a practical problem. If a world dies, some people may have to leave. But the apparent practicality can hide a prior moral judgment. What criteria were used? Who announced them? Could someone challenge the result? A story that simply follows the chosen may never ask. Karim’s story follows someone the system has excluded, so its claim to fairness cannot remain background scenery.
The name Jordbundna suggests attachment to the earth, while the English title Earthbound carries the same sense of being held below or kept from departure. Neither title identifies Max solely by what he lacks. His position also makes him the person with reason to question the ark’s authority. If departure is narrated as humanity’s collective triumph, the people who remain are in danger of disappearing into a mass noun. Max prevents that erasure. He has a goal, and the official story of a fair selection must meet the pressure of his particular life.
Karim’s approach does not require an assumption that the ark’s administrators are identical to any one present-day institution. The fictional system can reflect several familiar procedures without becoming a simple coded equivalent of them: border regimes, professional gatekeeping, the distribution of safety during a crisis and the power to describe those distributions as neutral. A speculative setting lets him push those procedures into a visible physical shape. The line between those aboard and those below is impossible to mistake.
In the Film Institute’s account, the project’s world is already ecologically exhausted. An assertion of fairness is part of the ark’s story even as most people stay behind. The claim arrives from the side with control over the vessel. Max’s refusal to accept his allotted place becomes a challenge to the story that authority tells about itself.
The film turns its vast world around a small, precise rule. Some people may leave; others must stay. A decision about departure turns human lives into an administrative outcome and allows the people who made that decision to recede behind a process. Max’s movement against it makes the process visible. Karim takes a familiar science fiction device and changes the person through whose eyes the audience sees it.
A Swedish migration story inside a global form
Karim did not arrive at Afrofuturism by adopting another community’s history as his own. In Habib’s interview, he describes first encountering the movement through an American frame shaped by slavery and colonization. He then distinguishes the history of his own family’s movement to Sweden. This distinction does not sever an Afro-Swedish project from a wider Black speculative tradition. It makes the relation more exact. His film asks what an Afrofuturist shift in perspective can reveal in a European setting marked by migration.
Karim was born in Uganda and raised in Sweden, according to the Göteborg Film Festival’s 2024 Nordic Film Market catalogue. A long Swedish career preceded Jordbundna. The Swedish Film Institute’s 2013 appointment notice identifies him as a director, screenwriter, cinematographer and editor, and records his study in Los Angeles. His experience across those jobs gives a practical dimension to his later arguments about access to filmmaking.
Karim’s migration distinction also guards against a loose use of the word diaspora. A Black person in Stockholm need not have precisely the same relation to state power, family history or national myth as a Black person in New York. The film’s future is legible across borders because the question of selection travels. Its particular force comes from Karim asking it as an Afro-Swedish filmmaker. If speculative art is to open new perspectives, it must allow those perspectives to retain their differences.
There is a temptation to treat Afrofuturism as an aesthetic checklist: a spacecraft, a dark screen, an electronic score, a Black protagonist. Karim’s own account points elsewhere. In Habib’s interview, the decisive event is a change in viewpoint. A familiar imagined future, one he had grown up with, suddenly looked narrow. The ark did not need a radically new shape to carry a radical question. Its inherited familiarity is what lets the question land. The person who is supposed to see the ship as a symbol of human ingenuity instead asks why he has been refused passage.
Karim said he had been interested in science fiction long before making this film. He valued its capacity to move a present moral question into a future scenario where technology and philosophy meet. That description fits Jordbundna unusually well. The technology has a dramatic function, but the moral choice is not solved by better machinery. A more efficient ark could still leave people behind. An apparently impartial selection algorithm could still conceal the values of its designers. The speculative move is to expose that gap between technical success and justice.
The hands behind the image
It is easy to tell the story of a director through subjects and positions alone. Karim has repeatedly insisted on the work of making films. In Nathan Hamelberg’s extensive interview for FLM, he recalls finding his place on a film set as a teenager, learning lighting and other jobs in practice, and later moving through production work in the United States. He describes filmmaking as a craft that people learn by doing. The professional mystique around equipment and credentials, in his account, can keep capable new makers outside the room.
Karim is concerned with access to the means of production: a camera, a crew, a chance to learn, a route through a funding system. The film’s imaginary ark is a closed structure. His interviews describe real structures of film production that determine whose work can reach an audience. Questions of access occupy him inside fiction and in the practical business of making it.
When the Film Institute appointed Karim a feature film commissioner in 2013, its announcement described his experience across directing, cinematography, screenwriting and editing. It also noted his initiative to make Black arts workers in Sweden more visible through a list. A commissioner exercises power over possible films, and Karim later spoke critically about the narrow professional circuits through which projects could obtain support. In the FLM interview, he made clear that his argument for more open routes into filmmaking came from an interest in creativity as well as institutional fairness. The work improves, he argued, when a wider range of people can make it.
This background matters to an Afrofuturist reading because futures are manufactured in the present. A film about the right to imagine who survives depends on material choices about who writes, photographs, designs, edits and finances a production. The Film Institute’s early project announcement named Olivier Guerpillon and Frida Hallberg as producers. SVT’s later page credits Frida Hallberg as producer, Andrés Rignell as cinematographer and Tomas Mayer as production designer, while Karim is credited as writer, director and editor. These names locate the film in a collaborative practice. Calling it Karim’s vision need not erase the workers who gave that vision form.
The production belonged to 2121, a six-film science fiction series organized by the Film Institute and SVT. The Institute’s 2019 announcement set out an equal budget for each film and invited the directors to imagine the next century. Karim’s was the only project in that announcement explicitly described by its director as Afrofuturist. Jordbundna emerged from Swedish film institutions, even though its maker has criticized how those institutions can operate.
That framework produced a valuable tension. A publicly supported series allowed Karim to put an Afro-Swedish perspective into national speculative filmmaking. At the same time, the existence of one such film does not by itself prove that the industry has opened widely. Karim’s own comments about the difficulty of pitching Swedish science fiction suggest that genre legitimacy remains part of the problem. In Habib’s interview, he argued that cost alone does not explain the relative scarcity. He saw a lack of knowledge of, and affection for, science fiction among decision-makers. His complaint concerns an imaginative ceiling as much as a financial one.
Another enclosed future
Karim directed another speculative film in 2021, Glaciär, from a screenplay by Camilla Läckberg. Viaplay’s account describes a pandemic that has killed half of humanity. Physical contact is forbidden, streets are under military surveillance and wealth buys a room in an isolated quarantine hotel. Inside it, a former doctor and a pastor begin a relationship that makes the prohibition on touch intimate rather than abstract. Lena Endre and Alexander Karim play the pair. The film allows a kind of pressure different from the compact pursuit in Jordbundna: two people remain near one another while the conditions of survival keep them apart.
The hotels in Glaciär and the ark in Jordbundna both protect a limited group while the world outside suffers, but their stories do different work. Läckberg’s script turns a rule of public health into an obstacle to love. Jordbundna directs its question at the authority that sorts people before departure. The comparison gives Karim’s direction a clearer range. He can stage a future through a boundary one character tries to cross, or through the impossibility of crossing the small distance between two people. Neither premise needs a city of elaborate effects to make its altered world felt.
The production of Glaciär also changed Karim’s relation to the routes through which a Swedish film can be made. In his 2021 conversation with Nathan Hamelberg, he described starting the project with Alexander Karim and Läckberg during the pandemic, imagining a small film made in a hotel, then financing it outside the usual support circuit as it grew. He spoke about the need to reach an audience when the makers themselves had put money into the work. The material risk was his own, but so was more of the initial control over the project’s direction. The pandemic setting became a way to make a film during a pandemic, using constraint as part of its form.
Glaciär is not presented as Karim’s Afrofuturist film. Its relevance lies in the director’s continued use of speculative conditions to test a human relationship and in the different production path he chose for it. The two 2021 projects show an artist working across forms and funding arrangements, asking what a small set of rules can reveal when pressure is placed on people who have to live inside them.
A film in time, and a history still being made
The Film Institute announced 2121 in December 2019. Jordbundna was produced in 2021 and published on SVT Play on 9 May 2024. Karim told Habib that he had begun writing it before the 2018 release of Black Panther. Its public arrival belongs to the early 2020s, but the creative question had occupied him for longer: what would happen to a familiar science fiction image if an Afro-Swedish character stood outside the ship?
SVT describes Jordbundna as Sweden’s first Afrofuturist film. Karim named the approach while the project was being developed and used it to reorganize the story’s central point of view. The ark remains familiar, but the experience of someone excluded from it becomes the story’s centre.
Karim's film presses on the rescue story's own values. The starship remains an object of wonder, while the promise surrounding it raises harder questions about power. Those who control a departure can decide whose life appears worth carrying forward. A person left behind can refuse the role assigned to them. The film's speculative premise makes that refusal visible within the very machinery of escape.
Krull’s conversation with Julie Dash about Daughters of the Dust and speculative fiction offers another way to consider what a changed point of view can do to film form. Dash speaks there about telling a family’s history through a structure that did not follow the familiar Western tale. Her film and Karim’s short differ in period, scale and method. The connection is a question both artists place before the medium: whose ways of organizing time and possibility have been treated as natural, and what becomes visible when an artist refuses them?
Karim’s film turns on one of science fiction’s simplest propositions: a future exists, but access to it has been rationed. The answer Max receives is that he has not been chosen. The answer the film asks a viewer to test is whether that decision deserves the authority it claims. Afrofuturism, in Karim’s hands, is the practice of making that apparently settled decision look strange again. The ark may leave Earth. The question about who boarded it stays with us.