06/06/2014 - Swedish directors Baker Karim and Sofia Norlin will interpret Ingmar Bergman’s award-winning 1973 TV series – with an audience

A sequence from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 TV series Scenes from a Marriage, which received 14 international prizes, including a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, will be remade on an open stage at this year’s Bergman Week on the island of Fårö, set to take place from 23-29 June.

Two Swedish directors, Baker Karim and Sofia Norlin, have worked on Bergman’s text together with students at Fårösund’s StoryEducation, a new educational scheme, and will film the scene with Swedish actors Alexander Karim and Josette Bushell-Mingo/Philomène Grandin in the roles originally played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann.

Audiences for the open stage will receive a copy of the screenplay before they enter the studio so that they can watch how it is transferred to pictures and words, while the film is simultaneously edited and cut. Two days later, the results will be screened, and the directors will discuss their experiences of working with Bergman's material.

Uganda-born Karim directed several Swedish features and drama series – such as the award-winning Swedenhielms (2003) – before being signed as feature-film commissioner by the Swedish Film Institute last year. Also last year, Norlin directed her first feature, Broken Hill Blues [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which was selected for the Berlin International Film Festival.

Organised with Film in Gotland, among others, the open stage is the first initiative aiming to create a new and unique centre of film production, education and culture in Sweden. The already-announced guests for the Bergman week (see news) – Danish director Bille August, French filmmaker Catherine Breillat and UK actor-director Richard Ayoade – will be joined by Swedish author Klas Östergren together with director Mikael Marcimain, composer Mattias Bärjed and actor David Dencik to discuss the upcoming film from Östergren's novel, Gentlemen.