BERGMAN ISLAND
This week, I watched BERGMAN ISLAND (trailer here) from French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love. Although this is Hansen-Love’s English-language debut, it still features the bucolic setting, natural pacing, and irresistible aesthetics that are hallmarks of French cinema. The story follows filmmaking couple Chris (played by Vicky Krieps) and Tony (played by Tim Roth), who travel to Faro, an island in the Baltic Sea where Swedish director Ingmar Bergman famously lived. There, they each work on their individual writing projects, but Chris struggles with writer’s block and missing her daughter June, all the while grappling with her purpose as a female filmmaker. In what seems to be a semi-autobiographical story that explores the relationship between real life and art, we follow the female protagonist as she moves away from her famous director husband’s shadow to make a name for herself. In a 2018 interview, Hansen-Love said that what she most admires in her favorite filmmakers is “precisely their sense of independence, how they created their own language and how they plunged into themselves to make their own films." BERGMAN ISLAND captures just that: a self-determination to tell your own stories from your own perspective in order to make art that is authentically and uniquely yours. This movie will make you want to leave everything behind to live a simple, idyllic island life, and get you thinking about what it means to be in love, make art, and live a life that’s worthwhile.
—Aimee Pham, Production & Development Intern
