Anna Westerstahl Stenport is director and associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she also teaches cinema and media studies. She is the author of Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting.

“Show Me Love (1998) offers us an emancipatory desire, both physically and metaphorically from the stifling geography of a small Swedish town and the ideological constraints of contemporary social hegemonies. Stenport chronicles Moodsson’s infatuation with garnering an adolescent perspective within his films, especially in relation to his aspiration towards authenticity in this tale of tentative love between two Swedish schoolgirls. As with the other books in the series, Stenport includes interviews with practitioners associated with Moodysson’s films. This exegesis also critically evaluates Moodysson’s authorial dichotomy, producing films inflected with the social-cultural contentions of their period of production, often problematically conflating questions of ontology and the divine whilst also engaging with a broad spectrum of differing aesthetic film forms. Much of Moodysson’s work, as Stenport highlights, is derived from a staunch retaliation against dominant hegemonic practices. Stenport, however, also draws attention to how Moodysson denounces many aspects of globalizing transnational forces. She also examines Moodysson’s wider significance as part of the New Queer Cinema movement in the 1990s. Above all, she offers a critical overview of Moodysson’s social and ideological commentary including his esoteric position in relation to the portrayal of a Swedish national identity onscreen.” Kate Moffat, Cinema Scandinavia, Spring 2015