This Christmas fairy tale for grownups by leading Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 40th Venice Film Festival and was awarded four Oscars.
Sweden, 1907. The bohemian Ekdahl family gathers at the house of grandmother Helena for a big Christmas dinner. The feast becomes the stage for the tragic events that will change the lives of every family member, but most of all of the two young siblings Fanny and Alexander.
Brought up in the religious family of a Lutheran minister, Ingmar Bergman endows his protagonists with a similar experience: after the death of their father, Fanny and Alexander find themselves in the family of a bishop.
The splendid life of the Ekdahls, filled with simple pleasures and human tragedies, is radically different from the Protestant everyday of Fanny and Alexander’s new family, which righteously unifies all aspects of life like a totalitarian system.
The anti-Semitic attitude of the bishop Edvard Vergérus, Fanny and Alexander’s stepfather, foreshadows the twentieth-century tragedies to come. As in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the end-of-an-era atmosphere creates a scarily calm existence outside of time and an escapist hedonism.
Bergman made over 150 theater productions and 50 films during his career, and in this work he combines both media. His theater unfolds on the screen like a baroque painting, its space filled with picturesque carnival compositions, crimson color, and sparkling highlights, like in a gallery of works by Caravaggisti. His cinema involves fast-paced and cool shots connected by dramatic cuts.
The film will be screened in Swedish, German, English, French, and Yiddish with Russian subtitles.
Fanny and Alexander
Director Ingmar Bergman
Sweden, France, West Germany, 1982, 188 min. 16+