Intimacy matters: Therapeutic discourse and the politics of the self in Nordic creative documentary film

This article argues that themes centred on the intimate sphere of life have become increasingly prevalent within Nordic creative documentary film culture. Drawing on analyses of the festival catalogue synopses of the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival’s Best Nordic Documentary selections from 2000 to 2025, it demonstrates not only a disproportionate number of films with topics foregrounding personal traumas and identity crises – predominantly within the context of the family and other close relationships – but also the pervasive use of therapeutic language in descriptions of the films’ core premises. The article examines the implications of this proposed therapeutic turn for the construction of political subjectivity and the political efficacy of documentary film by engaging Eva Illouz’s account of therapeutic discourse in a wider contemporary cultural context, Sara Ahmed’s critique of the pursuit of happiness as a cultural imperative, as well as Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between the private and public realms. Although therapeutic discourse and the integration of subjective approaches within documentary film expression are not asserted to be intrinsically correlated phenomena, the article contends that manifestations of therapeutic discourse have remained largely unaddressed in conceptualizations of subjective documentary within post-realist documentary film theory.