The physician and professor Herman Lundborg headed the world’s first state racial biology institute in Uppsala, Sweden, from 1922 to ’35. He was obsessed by the threat of racial mixing between Sámi, Finns and Swedes in the north. On his travels, he is drawn to a woman of Finnish-Sámi descent, and has a child with her.
Before being employed by the Nazis in what remains the most deadly program of “racial purification”, Eugenics was a very popular concept among scientists in the US and Europe. The science of “good birth”, which aims to create the perfect human being, sets out to achieve this by preventing reproduction of those perceived as weak, sick, disabled, or otherwise “degenerate”. As early as 1907, the US applied the first eugenics laws, which continued to be in force until the 1970s. In Sweden, 63,000 people were sterilized, mostly after WWII. The film switches deftly between the explanation of historians and the testimony of victims who continue to struggle for recognition of the harm they have suffered, which has been erased from the collective memory. From North Carolina to Sweden and Germany, a terrifying journey into this quest for the “best of worlds”.
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