Sweden's Island World - The Skerries Off Stockholm

Directly before a city that is home to millions lies one of the largest archipelagos in the world: the skerries of Stockholm. 10,000 people live there distributed among the 30,000 islands. It works out on average as three islands per person. We get to know this place in all four seasons of the year: in summer when the city folk come to holiday, in autumn when the islanders are recovering from the onslaught and just finding time to teach their children how to fish, in winter when it gets bright at 9 and then darkens again just three hours later and finally in spring when the ice breaks and the first city folk start to yearn for the skerries once again. At the centre of our documentary there are two blond, strong Swedish women who look as if they have stepped from the pages of a storybook: Lotten from the Jungfraueninsel, whose family, husband Urban and two small children, has an island all to itself, measuring just two kilometres long and three hundred meters wide. When the ice melts her children are taken to kindergarten by helicopter. Then there is Ylva, who lives on Rödlöga, the last island out in the sea. She runs Sweden’s most easterly shop and goes sailing in the storms when island life gets too much for her. Finally we meet the two gnarled boat builders Hans and Per-Oskar, who have been valiantly building wooden boats by hand for over fifty years.

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