Sweden

Backanterna is a recording of Bergman’s production of the staged opera Bacchae, a transposition of Euripides’ classical drama written for an amphitheater into a performance designed for the most intimate of stages, the TV screen, with music by Daniel Bortz. The original Euripedes text was re-worked for Bergman’s production, and the bacchae themselves became the focus of the action. Instead of an anonymous group, Bergman turned the women into individuals who each behave and perform in an individual way. In other words, the group was an individualized collective, portrayed by carefully selected soloists. Bergman also made an addition, creating a 14th baccha, Talatta, a non-speaking dance role that functioned as the dynamic doppelganger for Dionysus. Bergman used a minimalist stage which was made to look like a black box with a simple grey platform serving as acting space, placing focus on the vocal and stylized movement of the actors.Read More »

All three documentaries is mainly shot in the home of Ingmar Bergman. This is the first time ever that a film maker has access to Ingmar Bergman in his home at the small island Fårö in the Baltic Sea. Bergman and the Cinema starts with Frenzy from 1944 and ends with Saraband from 2003. It contains unique behind-the-scenes material from Bergman’s private archive. Bergman and the Theatre is about some of Bergman’s 125 theatrical stagings and about his delight with the TV medium with successes as Scenes from a marriage. In Bergman and Fårö Island he talks about the childhood that shaped him. He shows where he shot his film Persona and fell in love – and he lists his worst demons!Read More »

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An offbeat but very watchable black comedy about a hotel handyman who precipitates the breakup of a family, “Like It Never Was Before” could get solid box office returns both in Sweden and abroad, with careful handling.

Pic is the first script by popular gay writer and standup comic Jonas Gardell, a well-known media personality in Sweden, whose wit targets both gays and gay-bashers. His books are always instant bestsellers.Read More »

Charles Lindberg is an alcoholic, through and true. Always on the butt-end of the authorities he is only trying to make a decent living, and get some drink aswell…Read More »

Jocke is a troubled young man with a nasty right swing and a penchant for violence. His friends Gurra and Ray are not much better. There is no better evening sport than to beat up a couple of nazi skinheads and score some chicks – even if it leads to a path of doom.Read More »

Documentary short made for Swedish public television (SVT) about the past and current situation for Native Americans in the US. The film was produced as an introduction to the American documentary Navajo Girl (Robert Young, 1973). Något om USA:s indianer [Something about the Indians in the USA] is another example of Nestler’s method of combining still photos, drawings and moving images from different sources.Read More »

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Ingmar Bergman’s Shame is at once an examination of the violent legacy of World War II and a scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann star as musicians living in quiet retreat on a remote island farm, until the civil war that drove them from the city catches up with them there. Amid the chaos of the military struggle, vividly evoked by pyrotechnics and by Sven Nykvist’s handheld camera work, the two are faced with impossible moral choices that tear at the fabric of their relationship. This film, which contains some of the most devastating scenes in Bergman’s oeuvre, shows the impact of war on individual lives.Read More »

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Bergman’s little-seen English-language film starring Elliott Gould and Bibi Andersson, which charts the course of a doomed affair, earned mixed reviews on release in 1971 and was quickly overshadowed by his subsequent works – but it’s time to recognise it as a major entry in the director’s canon.

It’s unsurprising that many myths and misconceptions have arisen surrounding Ingmar Bergman, that of the terminally gloomy Swede being merely the most prevalent. Here, after all, is someone acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time yet viewed by those none too familiar with his body of work as a whole as a forbiddingly lofty, aloof philosopher rather than an artist or entertainer. (Even a feature in last month’s Sight & Sound claimed that some of Bergman’s films might today “be considered so wilfully opaque and mired in symbolism as to be past the point of parody”.)Read More »

Independent filmmaker Nina Hedenius Det speglar i mitt öga [My Eye Is Reflecting] is a poetic film on the act of seeing and on the details that rarely gets our attention. The film is a collage of diverse scenes depicting life, death, objects and people; a Swedish crayfish party, a classroom, cows in the meadow, the Stockholm subway… With musical effects by Ralph Lundsten.Read More »