Sally och Friheten
Sweden
, 100 min
Shown in 1981
CREDITS
- dir
-
Gunnel Lindblom
- prod
-
Ingmar Bergman
- scr
-
Margareta Garpe
- cam
-
Tony Forsberg
- cast
-
Ewa Froling, Hans Wigren, Leif Ahrle, Gunnel Lindblom
-
COMMENTS
Didn't screen; wasn't subtitled in time.
There appears to be a tradition in the Scandinavian cinema world for actors to be masters of their craft in every visual medium; in Sweden, particularly, one finds that an actor performs in theater, television and films, effortlessly, and with great artistic flourish. Within the past decade a number of Scandinavian actresses have turned toward film directing, each of them creating personal works that have been successful at home and abroad. Mai Zetterling, Anja Breien, Vibeke Lokkeborg and Marie-Louise de Geer Bergenstrahle have won awards at festivals for their films, and most recently two actresses whose careers are closely linked to the films of Ingmar Bergman have begun to direct: Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom. Gunnel Lindblom was born in Gothenburg and began her acting career with the municipal theater company there and in Malmo. She was acclaimed for her performances in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Goethe’s Faust and finally, in the cinema, worked notably with Bergman in The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring and The Silence. She was also seen in Henning Carlsen’s Hunger and Zetterling’s The Girls, both former entries in the San Francisco Film Festival. In 1973, Miss Lindblom began directing for the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, staging memorable versions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. She staged productions in Norway (Brecht) and Denmark (Strindberg) and made her debut as a film director with Paradistorg (Paradise Place), shown here in 1977. Her film dealt with the end of a bourgeois idyll, where two women of opposite temperaments discover new relationships with family and friends, as another more vibrant generation overrides their values. Bunnel Lindblom’s second film, Sally and Freedom, explores the heroine’s acceptance of self-liberation. Sally realizes that her husband has assumed the parental role from which she had hoped to escape. She leaves him, wanting to be a free woman again and tries a relationship with another man, characterized by mutual freedom and camaraderie. However, Sally finds this situation difficult, too. This is a film about modern woman, universal and in rapport with womankind, for whom equal rights means understanding, now.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #176
Hordes of screaming teenagers were fascinated with the Rolling Stones, but so were influential imagemakers Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Frank. The SFIFF has screened three different films with the Rolling Stones as the main subject: Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (SFIFF 1972), Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (SFIFF 1998) and the IMAX documentary At the Max (SFIFF 1991).
