Former American Vice President Al Gore is here in Sweden in connection with the premier of his film about global warming “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The TT news agency rather unkindly says Gore is here to give Prime Minister Göran Persson unexpected help in the campaign for the September 17 elections. True, Gore says “I am deeply impressed by what Sweden has done to take the lead internationally in combining environmental concerns with economic growth”. But the it is unlikely the Social Democrat party was able to influence international film distributors to get the film and Gore here at just the right time.

In fact, the distribution could have been a lot better. Here in Sweden there are two film distributors, the huge SF, and the much smaller Astoria (which used to be called Sandrews). There are seldom exclusive rights, SF generally has everything, Astoria picks up fewer films, and both will offer the same movies at different movie theatres.

But in the case of “An Inconvenient Truth” only Astoria seems to have the rights. Which means this extremely important documentary is only playing at two movie theaters in all of Stockholm, one in a very distant suburb. The other is on the southern island of Södermalm. Astoria has chosen to not show “An Inconvenient Truth” at any of its locales in the center of the city.

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