Review of Exposing Vulnerability: Self-Mediation in Scandinavian Films by Women

This review assesses Adriana Margareta Dancus’s Exposing Vulnerability (Intellect, 2019), which argues that first-person filmmaking by Scandinavian women mobilises vulnerability as an aesthetic, ethical, and political force, cultivating spectatorship that oscillates between intimacy and distance. Through close readings of Good Girl, The Reunion, Ida’s Diary, Sami Blood, and Fragility, Dancus links formal strategies—collage, haptic visuality, long takes—to consent, care, and circulation across public spheres. The review credits the book’s careful mapping of self-mediation as public address and its nuanced account of exposure becoming ethical encounter, while noting limits around audience heterogeneity and Scandinavian scope. Overall, it offers a teachable framework for courses on documentary ethics, feminist media, and Nordic cinema.