About Stefan Hedmark
A website like this is what happens when you have a strong need to bring order to your hobby. When I was a kid, I wasn’t terribly interested in movies but that changed in my teens. I started writing reviews for myself in 1992 when I was sixteen and haven’t stopped since. Eight years later I began to publish them online. After a while, my good friend Joakim Hertze persuaded me to buy a domain and let him create a database for the reviews. That’s how MovieHamlet.com was founded in 2002.
Also in Swedish
It has changed a lot over the years, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of a whim. The site is primarily in English, but there is also a section in my native tongue, Swedish, featuring reviews of films that are basically only seen by Scandinavians, as well as a blog. My ambition is really just to have a place where I publish my reviews but hopefully they might be of use to others as well.
As for the title… frankly, it’s a pain in the ass. I’ve never been very good at christening websites or various projects. My original intention was to have this site regarded as kind of a small hamlet in cyberspace that’s full of movie reviews. “Welcome to the movie hamlet”, you know. Not very good (especially since some visitors have come here looking for “the movie Hamlet” but found little Shakespeare)… still, for better or worse the title has been with me for years now and I don’t really feel like I should change it.
The sources
The technical facts that accompany each review are taken from several sources. The reliable one is Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide (and for the Swedish reviews, Svensk Filmdatabas) and the not quite as reliable (but still incredibly useful) are The Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia). Those last two sources are of course used judiciously.
I studied film for three semesters and then got a degree in journalism. I used to write reviews for a small paper in Stockholm, but today I work as a page designer/copy editor at the number one newspaper in Scandinavia… but this site is my number one spare-time project.
Enjoy your visit.
Stefan Hedmark
Photo @ Joakim Hertze.