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This article is an exploration of trans and non-binary representation in independent Swedish film productions. Two award-winning films, Pojktanten (She Male Snails, 2012) and Nånting måste gå sönder (Something Must Break, 2014), created by director Ester Martin Bergsmark (in collaboration with author Eli Levén), will be in focus and discussed through their ecological aesthetics that build on what I call intimate otherness. The two films represent not only a significant debut moment for Swedish trans cinema, but also offer a radical engagement with nature and the unnatural. While Bergsmark’s films incite a vivid aestheticisation of environmental pollution, ranging from items of garbage in the forest to untidyrooms, unwashed clothes, and dirty bathing water, the films’ ecological aesthetics, as I argue, imagine an enchanted space in which the trans body emerges as livable. Historically reduced to an “unnatural” and “contaminated” embodiment, trans bodies in the films form an intimate otherness with non-human objects and landscapes at the urban peripheries, at the margins of normativity and productivity. The films’ ecological aesthetics shift gender non-conformity from “unnatural” into a possibility. These aesthetics, I suggest, unfold into a gender-dissident´ landscape of rebellious and poetic, intimate otherness.

The current proposal for a revised European Directive concerning the quality of bathing water significantly increases the demands for the control of wet-weather discharges. A densely urbanised combined catchment was modelled for a 19-year long rainfall series in order to assess the current situation and to evaluate the benefits of potential solutions. Storage and advanced physical-chemical treatment of stormwater in the STP may significantly contribute for the reduction of the overflow volumes but reductions of the spill frequency under 2.5 spill days per bathing season are hardly obtained. This study reveals the severe strains that the local rainfall pattern may place on the control of the frequency of wet-weather discharges, pointing to serious technical, social and economical implications, at the local and at the national level, if the current proposal for a revised European Directive on Bathing Water is enforced.

The relatively frequent observation, during periods of onshore drift, of a surface line of convergence in nearshore coastal waters may have significant implications for the sampling procedure used for monitoring compliance with the EC Bathing Water Directive. A simple theory is developed for predicting the formation of the convergence line, and a possible alternative sampling method is suggested.