Man to Man is based on the war in Vietnam. Once again Mats Hjelm works with his father’s documentary material, combining it with present-day shots. And here again the father-son relationship figures as a subtext.

More noticeably than in White Flight, Hjelm detaches his gaze from the individual event and directs attention to the structures of a society that brings forth violence, or that actually is violence, as Stokely Carmichael, one of the central Black Panther figures, states in a passage of Man to Man. Man to Man can be described as a refined form of documentary film, expanded through the use of digital technology. There is no clear beginning and no clear end. Film sequences run parallel to each other in loops of images, merging to form a non-linear narrative – a formal analogy to the non-chronological structure of memory and of its images and effects.

As Hjelm asserts in an interview: “I’m searching for the kind of things I recognize. For things I have a feeling about, for something that influences me, not as a possible subject of debate but as an image.” In this sense, Man to Man is a study “between the lines,” a sounding out of perceptual structures and attitudes that usually remain unaddressed. For just a moment they make a brief appearance in the “big narratives” on war and conflicts in the different parts of the world.