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| Bo Widerberg |
Two highlights from the Nordic Film Festival, sponsored by Hurtigruten and happening across Australia in July-August 2026, courtesy of Palace cinemas.
One is the all-too-brief Bo Widerberg retrospective, remembering the work of a Swedish filmmaker with heart, style and a social conscience. Born in Malmö in 1930, he died of stomach cancer in 1996. The program features
three of his best films, hopefully the newly restored versions that screened in the seven-film series at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles last month.
Raven’s End (1963, 101 minutes), his second feature, tells the story of an aspiring young writer (played by Widerberg regular Thommy Berggren) aspiring to escape the constraints of the working-class area of Malmö that gives the film its title.
In Being Bo Widerberg (2025, 105 minutes), the documentary accompanying the retrospective, Widerberg speaks of wanting to imbue his characters with a “realistic life”, and the film’s stylistic similarity to the British “kitchen-sink” melodramas of the time is irresistible.
Elvira Madigan (1967, 91 minutes), Widerberg’s first feature in colour, is probably the film for which he’s best known. A far cry from the gritty realism of Raven's End, it’s a visually elegant romantic drama set around the turn of the 20th century about a couple seeking an escape from their everyday lives in the idyllic Danish countryside. It features the glorious andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 on the soundtrack and stars Berggren and Pia Degermark (pictured).
The source is a real-life case, although the documentary about Widerberg excavates yet another link to his personal life, one that the writer-director appears to endorse. Characterising him as – among other things –something of a womaniser, it has him saying of his intentions in making the film, “I wanted to show how difficult it could be to be in love with the wrong person.”
Also based on a real-life incident, Ådalen ’31 (1969, 110 minutes) deals with events leading up to and following a workers’ strike in a Swedish sawmill region during which the military forces, summoned by local authorities, opened fire on protestors. Widerberg’s work persistently empathises with the struggle of the disempowered for their rights (see also, for example, 1971’s Joe Hill, starring Berggren in the title role), and, in Being Bo Widerberg, he describes what took place in 1931 as “a turning point in the history of our country”.
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| Widerberg at work |
For its part, the documentary, written by Jon Asp who also co-directed with Mattias Nohrborg, offers a compelling, warts’n’all portrait of the filmmaker. It begins with home-movie footage of his Malmö childhood, before detailing his career from his early years as a novelist and, in his 1962 essay collection, The Vision in Swedish Film, as an outspoken critic of Ingmar Bergman’s “bourgeois” cinema. We frequently see him on set and in rehearsal, are introduced to his ill-fated struggle to shoot Joe Hill in the US (finished in Sweden) and to the controversy surrounding his final film, All Things Fair (1995).
Illuminating brush strokes are provided by a wide range of interviews with many of his contemporaries, including Berggren, Jan Troell (who shot three films for him, including Raven’s End), and Degermark, who says of her experience of working with him, not altogether disapprovingly, “He was a great manipulator. And he did it to everyone.”
Singling him out as a significant figure in the “Swedish New Wave” of the 1960s, numerous present-day dignitaries in the European filmmaking community – among them directors Olivier Assayas, his former partner, Mia Hansen-Løve, Lisa Langseth, Lars Von Trier and Roy Andersson – also offer their views. As do many of his wives and lovers and his four offspring, who were born to different mothers and feature as children in his films. The third eldest, Johan, has made a career as an actor (and plays the lead role in All Things Fair).
Pervading the film is the sense of Widerberg as a restless, troubled, complicated figure. Often viewed as a “dissident” within the Swedish film industry, he was also admired as a major artist. Bemoaning Widerberg’s struggle to find adequate financing in his later years, producer and longtime collaborator Kalle Boman says of his work, “Why wouldn’t you treasure someone who can do something like that?”
As noted by several interviewees, he’s also seen as the victim of severe bouts of depression, Berggren speaking with sympathetic dismay of the times when “the barbed wire in his head took over”. But his films speak for themselves, eloquent testimony that he was a creative force to be reckoned with.
@jnoe635098
5 days ago