Arne Sucksdorff’s debut—made when he was 23— is a lyrical short about Sweden’s late-summer crayfish fishery: night-time trapping on water, daybreak on the shore, and the rhythms of August nature rendered in carefully composed images. Often grouped with This Land Is Full of Life as one of Sucksdorff’s “hymns to the Swedish summer,” the film distills a 24-hour cycle into a seven-minute nature rhapsody.

A short drama documentary about the life of a Sami family in the northernmost part of Sweden, Lappland.

Arne Sucksdorff’s first film for Svensk Filmindustri, this lyrical short follows a fox cub through his playful explorations and predatory instincts in the Swedish forest. Blending moments of enchantment with unsentimental depictions of cruelty, the film captures the cycle of survival among animals with striking rhythmic editing and sensuous close-ups of fur, eyes, and forest textures. Rich in light and detail, Summer’s Tale became an enormously popular nature film and established Sucksdorff’s reputation for poetic documentary.

An impressionistic short film celebrating Stockholm’s rhythms of life, blending images of its streets, waterways, people, and architecture into a visual “symphony.” Winner of the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Short Subject, One-Reel in 1949 — the first Swedish film ever to receive an Oscar.

A short about Romanis in Sweden breaking up camp and moving on.

Arne Sucksdorff’s ethnographic feature documents the life and rituals of the Muria people in the Bastar jungle of central India, focusing on their traditions, music, and relationship to the natural environment. Presented with Sucksdorff’s lyrical visual style, the film was selected for the 1958 Cannes Film Festival.

Jorginho, his white friend Rico, Lici and Paulinho are homeless best friends living in a slum in a hill in Copacabana. They spend their hopeless life playing with kite; trying to survive getting food from the street market or the fishermen; learning how to pickpocket; working on the streets polishing shoes. Rico escaped from an institution in Caxambu that symbolizes hell on Earth for them. When he gets ill, he decides to return to the place because he does not want to die on the streets.

Arne Sucksdorff’s celebrated nature film follows two brothers in rural Sweden as they witness a fox raid and secretly raise an orphaned otter. Told through an adult’s memories, it reflects on childhood, nature, and the fragile balance between wilderness and civilization. The film won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival.

A remarkable and brilliant documentary, with superb photographs of nature in a beautiful landscape. Arne Sucksdorff is a swedish director important in the post-World War II revival of the Swedish cinema because of his internationally acclaimed sensitivity in photographing nature. His patiently photographed flowers, insects, birds, and animals are composed into films in which the rhythm of nature is dominant and man is only one of nature's creatures. Sucksdorff studied natural sciences and then turned to painting at the Reihmann Art School in Berlin, but his main interest was photography. After his first short film, Augustirapsodi (1939), won national awards, he was offered a contract by Svensk Filmindustri (1939–1953), Sweden's leading studio. Sucksdorff's early shorts were marked by the love of nature that had been traditionally characteristic of the finest Swedish silent films. Outstanding among them were: Trut (1944 "The Gull"), an account of a Baltic seabird community with the gull as the villain; Skuggor over snon (1945 "Shadows over the Snow"), about a bear hunt through the forest; Manniskor i stad (1946 "The Rhythm of the City"), won the Academy Award for best short subject; En kloven varld (1948 "A Divided World"); Uppbrott (1948 "The Open Road"), and Vinden och floden (1950 "The Wind and the River"), filmed in India. Sucksdorff wrote, directed, edited, and produced his first feature-length film, Det stora aventyret (1953 "The Great Adventure"), the story of life on a Swedish farm, using no professional actors. It further enhanced his reputation, as did such later features as En djungelsaga (1957 "The Flute and the Arrow"), Pojken i tradet (1961 "The Boy in the Tree"), and Mitt hem ar Copacabana (1965 "My Home Is Copacabana").