Everlasting Moments
15, Key Cities
Awaydays
18, Nationwide
Oh, what heaven, what joy, and if you don’t bother to see Everlasting Moments, then you are a bigger fool than I thought you were. (If it were possible.) It’s a Swedish period drama, set around 1900, and is full of simple yet rich, old-fashioned pleasures and not a single action sequence bar a hat blowing off at one point. Still, I don’t think it was CGI.
Directed by Jan Troell (most famous for 1971’s triple-Oscar-nominated The Emigrants), it is based on the true life story of one of his wife’s relatives, Maria Larsson (played with exquisite dignity by Maria Heiskanen), a poor, working-class belaboured mother of seven with a drunken brute for a husband whom she can never quite bring herself to leave. However, she does find some independence — intellectual and emotional — through the camera she wins in a lottery, and her subsequent friendship with the local photographer, Mr Pederson (Jesper Christensen), who initially shows her how photography works by training a moth’s shadow on to her hand.
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