When his daughter Johanna is born in 1983, Jan Troell tells the story about his childhood in Sweden and how things where when he grow-up in the land of fairy tales and potential prosperity.
Director: Jan Troell. AKA Land of Dreams
When his daughter Johanna is born in 1983, Jan Troell tells the story about his childhood in Sweden and how things where when he grow-up in the land of fairy tales and potential prosperity.
Director: Jan Troell. AKA Land of Dreams
poetic and educational Documentary of the intimate portrayal of what it was like for people to live in Sweden during the 1980s. Jan Troell’s first documentary feature and it is well worth a look. Thanks Jon
Another interesting Jan Troell entry.
When the THE EMIGRANTS and THE NEW LAND were released in the US I was still in high school. It’s the fashion these days to speak of Troell’s EMIGRANT saga as less then. Liv Ullmann, who considers it to be the crowning glory of all her film work, doesn’t feel that way and neither did her friend Ingmar Bergman. After years of treacly, sanitized TV and Hollywood accounts of the immigrant experience produced by us for ourselves, Troell brought out his epic two-parter which attempted to come much closer to the truth. While I’m sure it must “read” differently to those who reside outside the USA, I’ll never forget the power of witnessing those two films of his, even in the truncated form in which each was released at the time. For the first time, as an American, his films taught me WHY people wanted so desperately to come here and what they were willing to sacrifice in order to put that in place. Now that they have been restored to their original length I find them even more effectively moving ‘in toto’. It’s not the whole story for certain, but it tells its story well. Given the incorrigible events which we have witnessed here in the US in the last several years, I’d recommend all Americans during the remains of the pandemic to watch those films to remember an important element of “Why we were what we were” and — more painfully — to ponder on how much of that might have been radically lost. AMEN.