Debut: 'Berry Pickers' Spotlights True Victims Of Fallout From Overconsumption And Climate Change

“I can almost hear it. The sound of rain.”

A young Thai boy, outfitted in a knit hood, zip-up sweater, and a backwards baseball cap, looks at the vast expanse of land beneath the mountain on which he sits. A large pack is strapped to his back; his face is sweaty and smeared with dirt.

This is the end of a long summer for the boy, played by Nattapong Tonkongnam. Tongkong plays a Tem, Thai berry picker in Sweden, one of more than 7,000 such workers who travel to the country every season. These workers must fork over a hefty sum to the companies that employ them, often resorting to loans and debt just to make the trip to find work. When Sweden was hit with a heat wave in 2018, the berry season was canceled, leaving thousands of workers in debt with no way home. Berry Pickers tells some of their stories.

Director Agnes Skonare Karlsson says of the moving film,

“[The] sense of isolation due to climate change fascinated me, and as I kept digging, it became clear that the berry pickers’ situation raises the question of liability in our globalized economy. The fact that thousands of Thai berry pickers are stranded in Swedish forests during record hot summers is a result of a global crisis created by Western cultures’ consumption patterns.” 

Berry Pickers was not filmed during this heat wave, nor even during the summer season – the filmmakers used foley, warm grading, and costume to replicate the sense of suffocating heat that the characters experience. Combined with shots of a paltry harvest and swarming bugs, these aesthetic choices underscore the consequences of human-driven climate change, and the people and environment that suffer most because of it. 

“But as with so many global conflicts and situations, it’s rarely the causers of the crisis that get to handle its consequences. I hope this film helps highlight the question of liability in our global economy. Rather than giving lectures, I want to invite the audience into the universe of two brothers who find themselves in a particularly difficult situation.”

As the berry pickers, their colleagues, and their family argue throughout the film over the merits of staying in Sweden or escaping back to Thailand, Karlsson cuts in shots of vacationing Swedes, carefree and scantily clad in brightly colored swimsuits, frolicking in the water. Where the berry pickers must toil, the vacationers luxuriate. One man casually eats an ice cream cone topped with the fresh berries Tem and his brother worked so hard to harvest. The juxtaposition between those unbothered by the consequences of overconsumption and those forced to bear its burden is stark. 

Nattapong and Suttipong Tongkongnam, Rachanon Chaisang, Rewadee Jakobsson, Nutchanat Jonsson, Wutikorn Prejmai, and Nutthakorn Singlong, who portray the workers in Berry Pickers, are not actors by trade. Rather, Karlsson found them through an open casting call. With a limited budget, Berry Pickers was unable to fly actors in from Thailand – nonetheless, Sweden’s large Thai population comprises many whose families have ties to this industry. Karlsson says in the director’s commentary that because many of the film’s actors knew the plight of these workers, much of Berry Pickers was improvised and facilitated through a translator. The chemistry between Tem and his brother, the spontaneity and rawness of the dialogue, and the natural pacing of the scenes make Berry Pickers especially memorable. Though informative and hard-hitting, the film never verges on sanctimony. Rather, by showing the real lives and interactions between the workers, Berry Pickers invites audiences – many of whom are likely part of the overconsumption problem rather than its victims – to face climate change and the cavernous gap between the privileged and the global south. With expertly placed foley, beautiful grading, and compelling cinematography, Berry Pickers is a hard-hitting exploration of climate change, class division, and privilege.

Director Agnes Skonare Karlsson won The Adrienne Shelly Award for "Best Female Director,” "Best Student Short" & "Bridging the Borders Award" at Palm Springs ShortFest, “Best Student University Short" at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Jury Honors at the Columbia University Film Festival, and Best Short Film at Cinalfama in Portugal, among many other awards and nominations for the film and its team in 2022 and 2023. Director’s commentary and a Q&A can be found on the film’s Vimeo page.