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Man at Beer Cafe
A lonely man waits for someone to sit and listen.
By Susanne Björkman for Sveriges Radio (1974)

A short documentary from one of Susanne Björkman’s first radio assignments. A serendipitous recording of a lonely man in a ‘Beer Cafe’ in Malmö. As Susanne approached his table, he began a spontaneous monologue about his loneliness, which lasts the length of the song playing on the jukebox in the background.

Susanne Björkman was born in 1946, beginning her radio career at the Swedish Radio Company in 1971 and working exclusively in documentary form from 1976. She’s a garlanded feature-maker winning awards such as the Prix Italia, the Jörgen Ericsson Award and the Ikaros. In 1990 she became Sweden’s first professor in radio production at the Drama Institute in Stockholm. Susanne’s programmes are often portraits of people she has spent extensive time with, recording what happens in their lives. What is recorded is both an external and an internal process. The conflicts or themes that crystallise during the recording are often quite separate from the genesis of the documentary.