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Kicki has after several years abroad returned to Sweden. Her 17-year old son has been brought up by his grandmother and has a very distant relationship to his mother. In an effort to get reacquainted Kicki invites her son to join her on vacation in Taiwan. But her hidden agenda is that Taipei is also the home of the Taiwanese businessman with whom she has been conducting an Internet romanceRead More »
As a mysterious ‘shadow’ harasses a teenage girl in the middle of the night in a wealthy neighborhood in Goteborg, Sweden; the idyllic streets are beginning to look more like a prison than a place of self-fulfillment. Meanwhile, Paul – deep in a midlife crises – is trying to get closer to his estranged teenage daughter Selinda, who is struggling to form her own identity. ‘Reliance’ is the love story between a father and a daughter. A drama about the pain of letting go. But first and foremost an existential journey of how we all deal with dreams, fears and aspirations.Read More »
Stockholmsnatt’ is a cult film from 1987, which depicts the life of 17 year-old bad boy and figher Paolo Roberto. The movie deals with youth violence, rival gangs och peer pressure, but also family relationships och love. The story is based on Paolo’s own experiences fron the street and real incidents he’s been involved in.Read More »
She’s one of those definitively Generation X characters, the original latchkey kid, the first one left Home Alone: Pippi Longstocking, living on her own in the pastel Villa Villekulla without benefit of adult supervision and only a horse, Little Old Man, and a monkey, Mr. Nilsson, for company. Independently wealthy, thanks to her sailor-father’s adventures in the South Seas, she buys toys and candy for the town kids, pigs out on cakes and cookies, and is assuredly a bad influence on her young next-door-neighbors, Tommy and Annika (Päaut;r Sundberg and Maria Persson). Read More »
Dom över död man man. Torgny Segerstedt (Jesper Christensen) was one of the leading journalists in Sweden in the 20th century. As managing editor of the Gothenburg economic daily Handelstidningen, he fought a one-man battle against Adolf Hitler and fascism throughout the war years. It was a difficult fight, only made possible because of his reputation, the power of his conviction and the fact that he had friends in high places, not least among them his lover, the Jewish intellectual Maja Forssman (another tour de force performance from Pernilla August), the wife of his publisher. Exquisitely filmed in black and white, The Last Sentence continues Troell’s mission to illuminate history. Read More »
“A selection of Andersson’s droll little capitalist nightmares (‘the best in the world’ according to Ingmar Berman) featuring color-drained people who have ceased to be consumers and become the consumed. Middle-aged newlyweds pound one another’s skulls with appliances; new purchases bring disasters; and an infamous ad for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party rhetorically asks ‘Why Should We Care About One Another’ as nurses offhandedly toss patients around rooms, teachers shake down kids for lunch money, and commuters kick a man while he’s down” (Jason Sanders, Pacific Film Archive).Read More »
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Strongly influenced by the neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini, Port of Call is Ingmar Bergman’s most naturalistic work. Shot on location in the port of Göteborg by Gunnar Fischer (who would become one of the director’s key collaborators), the film focuses on the tentative relationship between Gösta (Bengt Eklund), a sincere, easygoing seaman, and Berit (NineChristine Jönsson), a suicidal young woman from a broken home. As Berit reveals more about her troubled past, and the couple confront many harsh realities in the present, a meaningful bond begins to form between them. With this confident and disciplined feature, his fifth, Bergman tackled moral and social issues head-on.Read More »
“In the Presence of a Clown (Swedish: Larmar och gör sig till) is a television film by Ingmar Bergman, recorded for Swedish television in 1997 with Bergman as a director. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of a professor named Carl, who has been found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to treatment in a mental ward. In the hospital he befriends a man named Osvald, and they attempt to make and promote a film.
The film was produced for Sveriges Television from Bergman’s 1994 play of the same title. “Read More »
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Unique, arresting and often grotesquely funny, Songs from the Second Floor presents us with 45 obsessively composed dramatic vignettes of decaying civilisation, set in and around a clammy Nordic city resembling a 1930s surrealist prophecy of Y2K apocalypse. There’s no plot, only a cumulative sense of impending doom as the hapless cast of failed businessmen, insurance swindlers, crucifix salesmen and senile fascists fitfully negotiate their way towards the ultimate betrayal of future generations. — BG