03/07/2013 - “It made me rediscover Bergman, and my own reason for working,” said UK director Sally Potter after the festival, which ended on July 1

“It was indeed satisfactory,” said Jannike Åhlund, artistic director of the International Bergman Week on Fårö, Gotland, concluding the 10^th anniversary programme which ended on July 1: 40% more visitors to the festival, and the opening of the former Fårö municipal school as a new Bergman centre, to facilitate screenings, exhibitions, seminars, workshops, performances.

Among the sold-out lectures was Swedish journalist and author Maria Sveland’s interpreting Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) from a feminist perspective. In a conversation with Åhlund, Swedish playwright PO Enquist described how he and Bergman avoided journalists during the shooting of The Image Makers (2000).

“The Bergman Week made me rediscover Bergman, and my own reason for working,” said UK director Sally Potter, who attended with her producer Christopher Sheppard to screen their new film, Ginger and Rosa [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and discuss her work with the actors with Swedish director Stig Björkman, whose most recent Bergman documentary was Fanny, Alexander and Me (2013). Potter will shortly (August) publish a book, Naked Cinema, on the same subject.

South African author Marlene van Niekerk read a poem for Nelson Mandela, which she had finished on the very day, and US director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig screened their new film Frances Ha, about a New York woman who apprentices for a dance company although she is not a dancer, discussing Bergman as an important source of inspiration in an interview with Åhlund.

Today July 3 the Bergman Centre will host a seminar about how culture icons – Ingmar Bergman and Swedish author of children’s books, Astrid Lindgren – can contribute to the development of their native villages, as the newly-opened ABBA museum in Stockholm has become an international tourist attraction.