Around Kvidinge in southern Sweden, the long summer days are filled with agricultural work, village rituals and fleeting encounters. Seasonal workers arrive from abroad, while local inhabitants move through a landscape shaped by labour, memory and the changing light.
Returning to the countryside where he grew up, John Skoog approaches it as both a real place and an emotional territory. The familiar gradually becomes mysterious, and the pastoral beauty of summer acquires an undercurrent of unease. Radically romantic and faintly haunted, Ridge drifts between warmth and melancholy, intimacy and estrangement.
Ita Zbroniec-Zajt’s richly textured cinematography and the film’s intricate soundscape give the landscape a powerful physical presence. Its contradictions and hidden histories emerge through light, movement and sensation, creating a world suspended somewhere between observation, memory and dream. Ridge won the DOX:AWARD at CPH:DOX, while Ita Zbroniec-Zajt received the Sven Nykvist Cinematography Award at Göteborg Film Festival.
