Fanny och Alexander

Framed by two festivities – the annual Christmas party of the theatre people and the celebration of the birth of two babies – the eventful saga of the Ekdahl family unfurls. They live in a mid-sized Swedish city in the decade before World War I. Family matriarch is the widowed grandmother Helena Erdahl (Gunn Wållgren), who has passed the direction of her theatre on to her son Oscar (Allan Edwall). Oscar and his wife Emilie (Ewa Fröling) are the parents of Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin). Alexander is a sensitive boy with a great power of imagination – statues and even ghosts can come alive for him. Surrounded by aunts and uncles, maids and cooks, Fanny and Alexander have a happy childhood – until their father Oscar dies. The widowed Bishop Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö) consoles Emilie, and with his eloquence he is able to win her over. The marriage with the self-righteous and merciless Bishop turns into living hell for Emilie, but particularly for Fanny and Alexander as well, who are kept like prisoners in the Bishop’s bleak, desolate house.

Ingmar Bergman conceived FANNY OCH ALEXANDER from the beginning as a multipart television production and at the same time as a feature film. Considered by many to be his opus magnum, the film received numerous prizes, including the Golden Lion at the 1983 Venice Film Festival and four Academy Awards that same year.