The Nordic Film Festival 2026 - Tom Ryan highlights a magnificent Bo Widerberg retrospective and recommends THE LAST RESORT (Maria Sødahl, Denmark, 2025)

 

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”.

 

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.

The other festival highlight I’ve been able to access is the Danish film, The Last Resort aka Paradis (2025, 100 minutes). The director and co-writer (with Therese Hasman and Eske Troelstrup) is Maria Sødahl, a 60-year-old Norwegian filmmaker who’s probably best known for the 2019 film, Hope, a fictionalisation of her encounter with what, in 2012, was originally diagnosed as a terminal brain cancer. This time, she turns her attention to another real-life crisis: the so-called “migrant problem” afflicting the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa.

Maria Sødahl

As The Last Resort  begins, sixth-form teacher Mikkel (Esben Smed), Louise (Danica Curcic), a chief of section at the Danish Ministry of Health (both pictured below), and their two children, 11-year-old Sille (Sif Lucca Gersby) and six-year-old Ella (Chili Olivia Jemsen), are arriving at a luxurious retreat on the island of Gran Canaria. Before long, however, on a night drive, they run into Ahmad (Aziz Çapkurt), who, lying injured by the side of the road, explains to them that he’s a recent émigré from Afghanistan. The accident occurs offscreen, the camera staying with the couple in the front seat of the car as it happens. 

Ahmad reluctantly allows them to take him to hospital, the difficulties in actually getting him there providing a strong indication that racism rules in this superficially sunny, smiling place. And subsequent events bring the otherwise liberal-thinking and well-meaning Mikkel and Louise face to face with their own complicity in the treatment meted out to “migrants” there. For those on the island, to which boatloads of Africans have made their way across the North Atlantic in search of new lives, the word serves as a euphemism for “refugees” (just as “illegals” has become a way for others elsewhere to refuse the reality of those in need of refuge). 

“It’s a story about us, for us, by us, white, privileged Scandinavians,” Sødahl told Variety earlier this year. “It’s about our self-image as being good human beings, and how this changes when we meet reality close up.” When Ahmad returns, seeking help from the couple, Mikkel does all he thinks he’s able to, offering him money to try to make the problems go away. Louise, on the other hand, with one eye on the family budget and the other on his explanation of why he needs the money, becomes suspicious. This is a full-on collision between two cultures. Ahmad looks at the resort and only sees “a fine place for rich people”; Mikkel and Louise look at him and the nearby refugee camp and see a world they cannot comprehend.

Sødahl limits what we know to what they know. We take up Louise’s doubts about what Ahmad is telling them and, retrospectively, it becomes clear why the accident is kept offscreen. Did it happen at all? Is Ahmad simply scamming these naïve Europeans? Their realisation that they’re part of the problem finds them looking in the mirror and loathing what they see looking back at them, Sødahl’s point-of-view strategy locking us into place alongside them.

“Someone told me it’s like The White Lotus for real,” the writer-director says. “But this is not a documentary… It’s a moral fable… From the beginning, I always saw the island as the world and the resort as Europe, this gated fortress which you can’t enter.”

At the same time as their parents are being forced by the situation to appreciate that the reality around them on the island is something different from what they’d thought it was, Sille and Ella are learning about their place in the confusing adult world around them. Ironically, though, the innocent Sille’s question to her increasingly flustered parents (pictured above) – and to us – seems entirely fitting: “Are you racist?”  

To its credit, Sødahl’s brilliant, uncompromising film allows no simple answer to her question. As it ends, we’re still seeing the world through Mikkel and Louise’s eyes: we finally don’t know who’s responsible for how events have unfolded; we don’t know whether or not Ahmad has been deceiving them, We might have our suspicions, but we don’t even know exactly what’s happened. We don’t know who’s responsible. All we know is that it’s everyone’s problem.