January 11, 2016 at 2:53 p.m.
All for Sweden
Northwoods native stars on Swedish reality show
All for Sweden
By Michael Strasburg-
This summer, Wroblewski was one of 11 contestants on Sweden's most popular show, "Allt för Sverige."
The show is a reality competition in which American contestants of Swedish heritage explore the country, its culture and its history while competing for the opportunity to connect with their Swedish relatives.
"The grand prize at the end of the show is that you get to have a huge family reunion with your Swedish family," Wroblewski said. "That's what everyone was trying to win the entire time."
Wroblewski was a rarity among "Allt för Sverige" contestants, for two reasons.
"I'm the youngest contestant they've ever had on the show and the only one that speaks Swedish," she said.
Wroblewski is currently studying Communication Arts and Scandinavian Studies at UW-Madison. She is fluent in Swedish and has had an interest in the country's culture and history for years.
"I've loved Scandinavian culture since high school, even the aesthetic of Scandinavian interiors is something that interested me," Wroblewski said. "I didn't know when I declared the major that it would snowball into something as big as it's become for me. It's just Sweden all the time, there is not a day that goes by that I'm not speaking Swedish or interacting with people in Sweden."
The casting process
Each year, a casting call for "Allt för Sverige" is sent out across the United States. Wroblewski first heard about the show last January when one of her Scandinavian professors forwarded an email to all of his students.
"I got this email and it seemed kind of like a joke. There was a link to a website with an online application and you had to make a video of yourself,' Wroblewski said.
Seeing no harm in spending an hour or so on the computer, Wroblewski threw together an interview video and sent it to the casting crew.
"I didn't know this beforehand but a lot of people go all out and hire people to help them with the application process and make the videos look really nice," she said. "I just pulled up Photobooth on my Mac and told them about how I speak Swedish and that I'm studying Scandinavian Studies as well Communication Arts. I think I impressed them with my Swedish through that."
After combing through the application videos, the casting crew held long-distance Skype interview with select individuals in March.
"I did it all in one day," Wroblewski said. "I got the email, thought it was the funniest thing, applied, made the video, sent it in and forgot about it until a month later when they started wanting to do the Skype interviews. Then it started to snowball."
Now in it's fifth season, tens of thousands of people have applied to be on "Allt för Sverige."
"Every year it gets more and more well known, it's the most popular show in Sweden and surrounding areas of Scandinavia watch it as well," Wroblewski said.
After completing a series of interviews via Skype, Wroblewski was flown to Los Angeles in April for an audition. Only the top 40 candidates were invited to Los Angeles. When she arrived, Wroblewski was whisked away to a room where she was interviewed by three Swedish people from the production company.
"I sat in front of them for an hour and they asked me all about my history," she said. "It was a very deep psychoanalysis basically of what has made me who I am today and why I'm interested in learning about my Swedish heritage."
Wroblewski made a great impression and won the casting directors over with her personality, despite her youth. The show typically features contestants who are 30 to 70 years old while Wroblewski was 20 when filming took place.
"I'd say 30 was the next youngest. Everybody was in the 30-45 range, then we had an older couple who were (in their) late 60s," Wroblewski said.
Allt för Sverige
Three months later, Wroblewski and 10 other contestants were flown to Oslo to begin filming season 5 of "Allt för Sverige."
"It's a heartfelt reality TV show competition," Wroblewski explained. "It's really its own type of sub-genre of reality TV. The people they cast are typically very interested in their Swedish heritage, they have a lot of Swedish or Scandinavian lifestyle infused in their daily lives here as Americans. You basically get the gift of going back to the land that your Swedish forefathers were from."
During her time on the show, Wroblewski got to visit places like Oslo, Gräsmark, Karlstad, Linköping, Södermalm, Stockholm and her personal favorite, Öland.
"We went to this place called Silverskär, it was kind of a beautiful, magical kind of island with big pillars of lichen," Wroblewski said. "We took a sauna and jumped in the Baltic Sea. It was really a magical kind of day."
Wroblewski felt that the traveling was not only a pleasure for her, but also for Swedes watching at home.
"I think in its nature, subversively, the show is kind of patriotic, but in an acceptable patriotic way for Sweden because they're not overtly patriotic like we can be here," she said. "They get to see their land with beautiful cinematography through fresh eyes, which is us."
Despite being given the opportunity to travel across Sweden for three weeks, the show was hard work for Wroblewski, the contestants and the filming crew.
"We'd usually wake up at 5:30 in the morning and shoot until 11 or 11:30 at night on busy work days," Wroblewski said. "It was hard work, I think, (and) I took it very seriously. I treated it a lot like work while I was there and eventually realized I'd like to do more stuff in front of the camera someday maybe."
The show eventually aired for eight weeks. Someone was eliminated during each episode except for the finale when several contestants were eliminated.
Seeing as the show was shot over the course of three weeks, Wroblewski saw fellow contestants eliminated every few days, eventually including herself.
At the end of each episode, the competitors would be split into two teams and face off against each other.
"It would be different team-building activities and whoever did it in the most amount of time was the losing team," Wroblewski said.
After that, the losing teammates would square off in an individual competition to determine who would be eliminated from the competition.
"You go home immediately," Wroblewski said. "You say goodbye, you do your interviews, then they take you to the airport and you go home."
Wroblewski was the fourth contestant eliminated from the show and found her elimination frustrating for a couple of reasons.
After her team lost a competition at a Swedish military base, she and the other losing teammates faced off in simple games of battleship to determine who would be heading home.
"For the game you hid two ships and each ship took up one square in a four-by-four square," she said.
Wroblewski lost her first round and entered the final elimination round against the other losing contestant.
"She guessed where one of my ships was the first go, so it didn't take her very long. I knew I lost when she got my first ship," Wroblewski said. "There really wasn't any strategy to it which really made me kind of angry. There were other competitions I was in where I blew people out of the water because it was memorization or other things. I walked in knowing it was a 25 percent chance I'd go home, then a 50 percent chance, then I remember bowing my head and thinking it was a 100 percent chance when she hit my ship."
Going home halfway through the show wasn't the only thing that disappointed Wroblewski. She said she also got short-changed when it came to her feature day on the show.
"One of the other things that was controversial was I didn't get my special day," Wroblewski said.
Each contestant has a day in which they go to their ancestor's home with a single camera crew and open a letter written for them detailing five to six generations of their Swedish ancestry and history.
"I didn't actually get to go to see where my ancestors were from and they didn't film me. It's kind of a package deal because you get fleshed out as a character and an individual when you have your special day and you get an introduction. They came and filmed me before the show, they sent single camera crew to Madison, and none of that got shown. They really didn't get my whole backstory and I was the only one with the way the timing worked. Some people weren't very happy about it because for some Swedes that is their favorite part of the show."
Despite not getting a feature segment, the producers did give Wroblewski the special letter she was to receive that day, along with a binder full of information on her Swedish ancestry and where her ancient relatives lived.
"They didn't have a ton of information to go off of because there was a church fire in Kville that had all the archives with more detailed family accounts, so they had less to go off of as compared to other contestants," she said.
After being sent home with her letter in July, Wroblewski had no choice but to wait until the show aired on Nov. 1 to see how things turned out. She found that the producers didn't alter the reality of the show too much, aside from condensing the personalities of the contestants so that they would shine through.
"They just augmented some of your characteristics, your good characteristics that stood out and really focused on that in different ways," Wroblewski said.
While entire episodes aren't available in the U.S without purchasing an international subscription, there are some clips available at www.SVTplay.sv.
"If you go to 'Allt för Sverige' there you can find clips of us doing different things for 30 seconds or so, and there are some pictures," Wroblewski said.
Professional opportunities, personal growth
Despite being eliminated from the show, it appears that Wroblewski isn't yet finished with "Allt för Sverige," or Sweden.
"I'm really hoping to go back this summer for a few different reasons, but especially to go where my ancestors are from and have a family reunion. I know a lot of contestants that are actually doing that who didn't win the grand prize," Wroblewski said.
Shortly after the show aired, Wroblewski's Swedish relatives contacted her.
"Now I have family that I'm in contact with on Facebook," she said. "They found me because they like to watch the show. They have some stories too."
In addition to retuning to Sweden for personal reasons, Wroblewski is also in the process of getting an internship with the production company to go back and work on 'Allt för Sverige' season 6.
"The producer messaged me and asked me if an internship was required for my major, which is recommended but isn't required," Wroblewski said. "Right now we're working on getting me back to Sweden maybe this summer to work with them as a camera team assistant, so I should be back working with the show for five or six weeks this summer."
Since her return to the United States, Wroblewski has filmed and edited a cast reunion in Chicago, along with individual interviews of the contestants.
She said she has found that her experience with the show was the perfect intersection for her two majors, Scandinavian Studies and Communication Arts (TV, Radio and Film).
"I didn't start learning about the composition of film in school until I came back, but being in front of the camera you come to understand that production time is a lot slower than real time when you're watching the show ... coming back I learned more in my classes as I was watching the show and understanding more about the techniques they were using that I wouldn't have known had I not been taking production courses," she said.
In addition to benefitting her university education, Wroblewski believes that the show helped her better understand her personality and develop greater confidence in herself.
"I grew lot while I was there and I came back wanting to see the world through a lens of opportunity and trust that if I'm being genuine and honest with myself that I can accomplish cool things," she said. "I think it's given me a lot of confidence in myself and self-assurance with the unknown and I'm sure that will help me as I go on because I don't really know what will happen next, but I'm sure it will be cool. I'm OK with the unknown."
Perhaps most important of all, the show has had a positive effect on Wroblewski's outlook on life, she said.
"I think timing is everything and that you have to be patient and put your best intentions into everything. Even if you can't see more than 10 feet in front of you it seems like there is a larger purpose and if you keep listening to your instincts it will suddenly play out in a whole timeline of something you have never anticipated before," she said. "I think you can translate that to anything in life."
Michael Strasburg may be reached at mstrasburg @lakelandtimes.com.
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