The New Man

It is 1951 in Sweden. The country is building a new society. That society has another face to it. People from poor families are the ones singled out. Gertrud is seventeen. She is lively and headstrong. After her mother dies her father tries to care for her. The local authority does not find that care good enough. Gertrud is placed in a home called Odenslund. Something is asked of her there. She is expected to accept compulsory sterilisation. She refuses, and she helps several of the other girls get out, in a country where sixty three thousand people were sterilised between 1934 and 1976. Julia Högberg and Maria Lundqvist appear in the hundred and four minute film, a Finnish and Swedish production Klaus Härö finished in 2007.