08/11/2013 - The 73-year-old Norwegian director, who has just submitted a script for a new feature and considers an update on her Wives trilogy, is celebrated by a retrospective including six of her films

“Celebrated in her home country and throughout Europe, but little-known in America,” is how New York’s Museum of the Moving Image introduces Norwegian director Anja Breien (photo), currently attending an homage programme (November 1-9) including six of her features and numerous shorts, as the first Norwegian filmmaker in focus on 35 Avenue.

Organised by Norwegian film critic Maria Fosheim Lund, and presented by Columbia University film professors Jane Gaines and Richard Peña, Breien’s first retrospective in the US screens Wives (1975), which she made as a riposte to US director John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

Starring Anne Marie Ottersen, Katja Medbøe and Frøydis Armand, the drama-comedy follows three women who leave work, husbands and children to go on a one-week spree. With the same cast she made Wives – Ten Years Later (1985 – also in the programme) and Wives III (1996).

“It is a great honour and a good reason to start planning my 50^th anniversary (next year) as a director,” said 73-year-old Breien, whose latest work was an untitled short (2005). Her nine films between 1971-1996 were most recently shown at festivals in Paris, Rouen, La Rochelle – and all of them in the Polish showcase in Wroclaw 2011.

The MoMI selection was launched by her 1977 Swedish feature, Games of Love and Loneliness, which she was assigned to after Per Blom fell sick. It also comprises Next of Kin (1979), which was selected for competition in Cannes and seen by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who told her it should have won a prize.

Before going to the US Breien told local press that she thinks “she still has a couple of features in her.” She has just submitted a new script, co-written by Peter Hjorth -  “and we have been talking about making a new Wives instalment, now we are so old it is time for an update,” she concluded.