Börje Ahlstedt
Ingmar Bergman himself has often stressed how important the actors are to his work, and that they constitute his greatest source of inspiration. From this perspective it is therefore interesting to look at Bergman through their eyes. ”The Men and Bergman” is dedicated to the late Ingmar Bergman where several prominent Swedish actors; Thommy Berggren, Börje Ahlstedt, Thorsten Flinck and Erland Josephson discuss their work with Bergman in film and theater. We are given a unique portrait of Ingmar Bergman as a personal instructor and coach, as a human being, spanning from the earlier years in the 1950’s to his last theater productions fifty years later. We are treated to stories about Bergman the director as well as personal anecdotes about Bergman the man. Renowned Swedish film critic Nils Petter Sundgren, who has followed Ingmar Bergman throughout his career, hosts the program.
Helen, a priest, is approached by scientist Lisbeth with a desperate plea for help. A young man, who has been sent to a high security psychiatric ward after having killed an old couple, has attempted suicide while rambling about God. Having been part of an experiment attempting to humanize inmates by assigning them pets, the young man has suddenly gone ballistic. Fearing that he will attempt suicide again priest and scientist must now confront their mutual animosities while trying to grasp the truth. In a race against time the two women begin a shocking journey deeper and deeper into the sick mind of a young man's soul.
There is a thin line between money and loyalty. Thomas Skepphult runs an investment company, and is arrested for the murder of his business partner when his fingerprint is found on the murder weapon. When he tries to call his lawyer, the phone is answered by someone who he thought had committed suicide years ago.
Ulf think this is going to be an ordinary summer. Going to his grand parents and swim in the lake and tease his brother. But that's not the case, because this summer he will fall in love with Pia.
An overworked and stressed out man in the middle of his career causes the worst tragedy that can happen to a family...
The movie is a sequel to Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973), where we revisit the characters of Johan and Marianne, then a married couple. After their divorce, Johan and Marianne haven't seen each other for 32 years. Marianne is still working, as a divorce lawyer. Johan is quite well off and has retired to a house in the Orsa finnmark district of Sweden. On a whim, Marianne decides to visit him. Johan's son from a previous marriage, Henrik, lives nearby in a cottage with his daughter Karin, a gifted cello player. The relationship between father and son is strained. Plot by Mattias Thuresson.
A documentary about the film, I am Curious-Yellow (1967), and how it made it into the USA and changed film in USA forever by breaking the USA Obscenity Codes.
Michael has a secret that he intends to announce during his birthday party. He has finally decided to propose to Catti, his girlfriend of many years. But Catti has other plans ...
A mysterious ship has sailed into Pippi's hometown and the Captain turns out to be her father...
A mysterious stranger, Meisner, arrives in a northern Swedish town in 1820, calling himself a magnetist - an amalgam of hypnotist and healer - and claiming he can cure diseases un-treatable by doctors. Ignoring the objections of his colleagues, Dr. Selander allows Meisner to cure his blind daughter, Maria, who not only regains her sight, but also falls in love with the charismatic magnetist. Dark secrets and repressed memories start to emerge, amidst the love between father and daughter, man and woman.
Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert - and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, "The Joy of the Joyous Girl"... Written by Fredrik Klasson
Behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the television play "Larmar och gör sig till", directed by Ingmar Bergman. It shows the director and his actors up close. A fascinating glimpse of how the legendary director works.
One hour making off of Bergman's In The Presence of A Clown.
"All people with a tiny bit of sense get depressed in this country", says Patricia in "The Last Yankee". Two men - a carpenter and a successful self-employed business owner - visit their wives, who both are patients in a mental hospital. Why has life become so unbearable for them?
The war in former Yugoslavia is suddenly on the doorstep of 16-year-old computer freak Rasmus when he meets and falls in love with refugee girl Belma. Belma lives with her father and other refugees on Flotel Europe in Copenhagen. One day Belma’s father recognizes one of his torturers from prison camp among the refugees on the boat. The executioner is attacked and Belmas father gets arrested. Rasmus and Belma must prove his innocence.
Little Pu spends a summer in Norrland with all his relatives. He and his brother get to hear the story about the watchmaker who hung himself, learns to shoot with a bow and follow his father on a bicycle trip.
The story of Ingmar Bergman's parents. In 1909, poor theology student Henrik Bergman falls in love with Anna Åkerbloom, the daughter of a rich family in Uppsala. After their wedding Henrik becomes a priest in the north of Sweden. After a few years Anna can't stand living in the rural county with the uncouth people. She returns to Uppsala, Henrik stays in the north.
Hans and Lollo just had their first child. Hans is a gym teacher and is constantly tormented by his pupils. Hans's dad Bengt, is a news reporter on TV9, the channel who shows "such as people want to see". Bengt's latest report series is about a rapist who likes little girls. Bengt begins to suspect Hans...
Magni is a farmer who is planning to marry Teresia who comes from a rich family. When his maid Lovisa finds out she gets furious, she has been working for him without pay for 12 years because of vague allusions to marriage, now she wants her pay! She calculates that her back pay is the same as the fortune Teresia would be bringing to the marriage.
Larry Pedersen, professor of psychology of religion, has just divorced when a student named Elisabeth student must take the exam before him. Later in the evening the same day, she is beaten by her boyfriend and then Pedersen offers her a bed for the night.
A charged power struggle between spouses. A tug of war to the death of an only child as ends and means. From an August Strindberg play.
Emma (Line Kruse) is an eleven year-old only child from a wealthy Danish family. Emma's parents seem more interested in their own interests than in her. One evening when Emma overhears her mother talking about how tragic it must be to have your child kidnapped, Emma decides to stage her own kidnapping. She soon meets Malthe, a kind-hearted, child-like, naïve sewer cleaner who literally stumbles on to her. She convinces Malthe that she is a Russian princess whose family is being chased by Bolsheviks, so Malthe lets Emma stay with him in his very modest abode. After being "kidnapped" for a few days, Emma decides to return home. But, just as she is about to return, she overhears a couple of servants talking about how her parents don't seem to be very upset over her dilemma....
This well-executed biographical docudrama is a plunge into the madness (and the sanity) of a writer living life on its rawest edges. Agnes Von Krusenstjarna (Stina Ekbland) was a Swedish novelist (1894-1940) whose works ranged from the idyllically romantic to crushingly sardonic, sexually explicit autobiography. Von Krusenstjarna teamed up with the eccentric bisexual David Sprengel (Erland Josephson) and continued to suffer bouts of mental instability that Sprengel felt were best cured by sexual abandon. Von Krusenstjarna was not a model of emotional health when she first met Sprengel. She had inherited madness from her family while at the same time passionately rebelled against the narrow-minded mores of her genteel but poor parents. With his own wildly unorthodox behavior, Sprengel both helped and hindered Von Krusenstjarna throughout their turbulent relationship.
Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.
Ronya lives happily in her father's castle until she comes across a new playmate, Birk, in the nearby dark forest. The two explore the wilderness, braving dangerous Witchbirds and Rump-Gnomes. But when their families find out Birk and Ronja have been playing together, they forbid them to see each other again. Indeed, their fathers are competing robber chieftains and bitter enemies. Now the two spunky children must try to tear down the barriers that have kept their families apart for so long.
Limpan is an alcoholic who has been put into a caretaking home for alcoholics. He's promised a job on the 'outside', but he's not released from the home, so he runs away. He misses the job and gets caught and is brought back, but they won't accept him, since it's after closing time. During a couple of days, he wanders back and forth between the home and the world, meeting several different people who all have their different problems, which Limpan confronts and all the time, there's the question of alcohol; to drink or not to drink.
As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.
35-year old Erik Engman, aka Pinnen, is the local fool. He picks up garbage and eats at the old people's home. One day he is asked to try the high-jump at the sport's field. He becomes fascinated and starts to train every day. Being fool-hardy, it doesn't take long before he is one of the best in the country and is asked to compete at the Stockholm Stadion.
Reine is supposed to go to a summer camp called Children's Island but decides to remain in Stockholm over the summer while his mother is working at a hospital. She thinks he is at the camp, and he tells her he is. We then follow him around Stockholm that summer and see what he encounters on the path of life.
"A Dream Play" - Agnes, a daughter of the Vedic god Indra, descends to Earth to bear witness to problems of human beings. She meets about 40 symbolical characters.
Kristoffer lives on the verge of poverty, just barely supporting himself on his photographic work and an allowance given him by his ex-wife to support their child. He is staying in his absentee mother's large old house, which she is preparing to sell. When he takes a photograph of a man who died by his own hand, the image fascinates him. He grows obsessed with the dead man's story and pushes his researches as far as they will go. This psychological thriller is based on Johan Bargrum's book Darkroom.
When Dante's parents go on vacation, Dante and his buddy Tvärsan get the chance to play detectives.
A fairy tale and satire about a wealthy industrialist, whose son has been subdued and oppressed and totally uninterested in his father's business.
Steve works as a locksmith and one day he meets Lotta in his work. After helping her get back into her apartment they decide to see each other again. Though they are dating Steve still goes out with other girls, and in situations like this a big city quickly becomes a small town.
This Swedish sex-comedy/drama explores the complications in the relationship of a couple who believe that if they make love to each other, they will die. They neck and are physically affectionate in public as well as in private, but have a big taboo against sexual consummation. Their situation drives them to distraction, and they unsuccessfully seek various extramarital outlets for their frustrations.
A Swedish couple are trapped in their marriage and way of life. Locked up in their bourgeois inferno.
A large number of jewelers in different central Swedish cities are exposed to burglary. The method elicits the police when the jewels were stolen without any door to the shops being broken up. When an elderly jeweler is murdered in his shop, the local police first conclude that it is another crime of the same offender, when another jeweler in the city got burglary the day before. But Sverre Sterner soon begins to suspect that completely different motives are behind the murder. The wires lead backwards in time around a putative drowning accident.
About an alcohol-damaged young man, his life in and out of prison, his friend the art teacher and his difficulties reintegrating into society.
Joergen (Per Myberg) is the Swedish journalist who uncovers a gun-running operation on the borders of Vietnam. The trail leads to a financial group of wealthy industrialists lead by Magnus Rud (Max von Sydow). He refuses to bury the story, leading to trouble for the idealistic reporter and his girlfriend Christine (Lena Granhagen) in this political drama about the war machine and freedom of the press.
The same movie with the same characters, cast and crew as I am Curious (Yellow), but with some different scenes and a different political slant. The political focus in Blue is personal relationships, religion, prisons and sex. Blue omits much of the class consciousness and non-violence interviews of the first version. Yellow and Blue are the colors of the Swedish flag.
Lena, aged twenty, wants to know all she can about life and reality. She collects information on everyone and everything, storing her findings in an enormous archive. She experiments with relationships, political activism, and meditation. Meanwhile, the actors, director and crew are shown in a humorous parallel plot about the making of the film and their reactions to the story and each other. Nudity, explicit sex, and controversial politics kept this film from being shown in the US while its seizure by Customs was appealed.
Two pilots must fly together in spite of the strong dislike of each other. At a training mission the aircraft wrecks over open water and they have to save themselves by parachute.
Films the process of making Bo Widerberg's film "Death of a Salesman'.
