Films with: Palme, Ulf

Fröken Julie = Miss Julie

"Miss Julie" takes place one Midsummer Night, during the festival when all Sweden celebrates the midnight sun and a full day of light. At a posh country estate, the servants sing, dance, and drink the day away. The Count is celebrating elsewhere, only his daughter Julie remains. She is ready to dance and drink with the lower class, especially her handsome footman Jean. Both are trapped by the repressive society, rigid class system, and strict gender roles of the nineteenth century. Like Estella of Great Expectations, Julie was shaped by her progressive feminist mother as an instrument of revenge on the entire male sex; unfortunately, the dart finds an entirely different target.

DVD 13005

Här har du ditt liv Here is your life /

This mesmerizing debut by the great Swedish director Jan Troell (The Emigrants, The New Land) is an epic bildungsroman and a multilayered representation of early twentieth-century Sweden. Based on a series of semi-autobiographical novels by Nobel Prize winner Eyvind Johnson, the film follows a working-class boy's development, from naive teenager to intellectually curious young adult, from logger to movie projectionist to politically engaged man of the people--all set against the backdrop of a slowly industrializing rural landscape. With its mix of modernist visual ingenuity and elegantly structured storytelling, this enchanting film--presented here in its original nearly three-hour cut--is a reminder that Troell is one of European cinema's greatest and most sensitive illuminators of the human condition.

DVD 13006