My concerns has always been fulfilling the purpose of each specific project as fast, cheap and effectively as possible. I myself, like to regard most of my films as elaborate home videos.

Except for United States of Afghanistan and Buy Bye Beauty all of my films were produced on a zero budget. No photographer, other crew or production assistance was ever involved in any of them.

Filmmaker Pål Hollender travels back to Kabul and throughout Afghanistan in search of Ali Sajjad, a bright kid he met in Kabul nearly 10 years ago. Will Ali still be as open-hearted and hopeful as he was when he was nine years old? Is he still alive?

Finding Ali unveils the occupation of Afghanistan, the logical development of mis-trust, disappointment and rage from ordinary Afghans against the U.S.A. and the Nato. They were promised peace and development, but were given a brutal "War against Terror".

Being welcomed with open arms by the Afghans a decade ago, the filmmaker now experiences an overwhelm-ming feeling of rejection, painfully culminating in a road-side attempt on his life.

Without sentimental trickery Finding Ali brings you closer to understanding the people enduring life in Afghanistan.

This film was fully funded by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and The Visual Arts Fund.

Completely unprepared Pål Hollender and his friend-with-a-death-wish, Swedish pop star Olle Ljungström, went to Afghanistan, wrecklessly diving into the tension building up in september 2002, the anniversary of 9/11 approaching.

The disturbing ignorance of the two friends from Sweden is as relevant as the meeting with the Afghan people and their culture.

The “dogumentary” rules of Lars von Trier’s was created to minimize manipulation of the reality on location aswell as the material filmed and edited. United States of Afghanistan was the first dogumentary ever produced.

The film was produced for television and was aired mainly in all of the Nordic countries in 2004.

"The notorious Buy Bye Beauty documentary by Swedish filmmaker Pal Hollender was said to have provided "exaggerated and untruthful" data on the scale of prostitution in Latvia. Now, when the popular indignation has ebbed away, it turns out the number of sex workers in Riga actually is just large enough to make it difficult for tourists to distinguish them from all the other women." Pauls Bankovskis/Rigas Laiks. 2005

"Sweden exploit their neighbour states twice, economically as well as on a personal level. Latvia advertise for our companies with their low levels of wages. Our countrymen, along with other foreign investors, are the same that most of all indulge in the consequense of the low wages, the sex industry." Excerpt from the synopsis, Pål Hollender. 2000

Buy Bye Beauty was filmed in Riga, Latvia year 2000, before Latvia became a member of the EU. Buy Bye Beauty was aired in Sweden in 2001 causing a major national debate on exploitation, prostitution and my method of actually having sex with my interviewees in the film. In the web version all material exposing the interviewees has been left out. The full length uncensored version can only be found in my DVD box Pål Hollender - video 1996-2007.

Pelle Polis, Pelle Policeman is bad desire. Pelle Policeman is the nom de guerre of the first Swedish policeman to out as a gay in the '70s, and who until recently was active in the gay rights movement. Among other things, he worked to lower the age of consent. He contacted Hollender after having seen "Journal", since he was the first person that Pål the teenage boy confided in after having been abused. At that time, Pelle Policeman advised him - as a representative of the police force - not to report the felony. In "Pelle Polis" (1998) their stories intertwine again. It is a film driven by Hollender's desire to get even as much as it is the uncovering of the pederast's mind.
Pelle Policeman is shifty and a bit thick, and when the artist literally seduces him, the ethical stakes of subject-object relations are raised to a maddening degree.

Lars Bang Larsen, Art&Text

"Pål Hollender recounts the experience of being abused by the father of a childhood friend. In abrupt shifts he is alternately the narration’s subject and object, the criminal and the case history, a fictional character and a real-life human being, pathologized and abandoned in a field of anonymous authority.

Hollender’s long and elaborate video works do not amount to a simple case of intertwining fiction and the real...Hollender’s work guarantees that there are no pure symmetries nor uninfected relations. This is the sheer redundancy of trauma: it materializes in all dimensions of your life, at all levels of reality.

Journal was the first video I ever made. I had no budget what so ever and the entire filming and editing process took only some two weeks working day and night. This happened in 2005 but I did some re-editing and added some additional details in 2006."

Of all my videos, I consider Whiners (Vinare) to be the most violent. You get to see my son play while my mom watches. My son's voice is in slow motion. From time to time they ask if I'm filming. Their anxiety increases. Whiners exposes our lack of connection, that is, even my own lack of connection to my mother and to my son. It is I who points the camera towards those I am close to without answering their questions; it is I who comes along with the assertion about my mother's alcoholism; it is I who causes their worry.

I follow a friend of mine, who suffers from an annoying death wish. Annoying from a friends perspective, that is. His first born daughter died just a couple of months old when Örn was in his early thirties. Örn always keep a deadly dose of sedatives in handy, just in case. He claims the only reason left to live, is the fear of otherwise disappointing his two grown kids. I followed Örn for a CT scan at the hospital. Nothing was out of the ordinary. He got dissapointed.

Eagleboy was aired on Swedish television in 2002.

(sv) Jag följde med Örn med kameran på en CT-scan på Östra sjukhuset i göteborg. Han röntgades för att hans läkare misstänkte en hjärntumör, men på tvärsnitten av hans skalle syntes inget onormalt. Han blev besviken.

The short video Performance was screened for a year randomly on swedish cinemas, inserted without further commentary among the commercials. Performance is in itself almost completely neutral, effectively working as a projection screen to it's viewers.
Is this an abuse in the making or is it just a cute little film? What's the message?

In a dangerous stunt Pål Hollender subdues his audience, forcing them to be a part of the performance. Based on a dream about failure Pål stages an attempt to reach a goal set too high. An attempt bound to fail.

"In Trying to get Out of My Body (1997) Hollender is making stubborn attempts to be an acrobat, swinging himself from one trapeze to another. Not being trained for this he constantly falls down, accompanied by his own shrieks. Right after, he is on his feet again repeating the same procedure. In the audience people begin to feel uneasy, something which is contrasted by the fact that he almost treats the image on the screen of the monitor as a harmonious colorful abstract painting, filming the whole scene from above." Maria Lind, Curator

One in a series of gender bending small projects from 1996. The word "mus" in musvideo, meaning mouse, refers to the vagina in the same way "beaver" does in english.

In "Konfrontation" Pål Hollender challenges the bully superintendent of the wood workshop at his school, the Valand Art Academy. He steals something dear to the superintendent, buries it behind a wall in the academy building. Pål then confronts the superintendent.

Shaking life into a daddy doll in its original package.