Fanny and Alexander
Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1982. In 1979, Ingmar Bergman conceived Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, calling it “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.” The director returned to his own childhood in Uppsala, Sweden, and for the first time, told a story from the perspective of a child, Alexander Ekdahl. The film interrogates family, faith, mortality and—perhaps most importantly—imagination. At its core is the ideological clash between the creative Ekdahl family and their authoritarian bishop stepfather—a figure inspired by Bergman’s own father, a Lutheran minister. Part of the series Nostalgia, A Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque Program. Screening on film.