Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema

Film Forum

In the early 1960s, inspired by the French New Wave, the turmoil of his own personal life, and galvanized to create something that defied the conventions of what he believed was his country’s “dull” and “disastrous” film culture, Swedish director Bo Widerberg (1930–1997) launched a trailblazing and singular career, making multilayered films that explored familial and romantic conflicts against backdrops of political and social upheaval. Widerberg's genre-defying filmography includes his protofeminist first feature The Baby Carriage (1963); the semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that Bergman considered “a perfect masterpiece,” Raven’s End (1963), the first of Widerberg’s films to be screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, later nominated for an Academy Award®; two dramas about the labor movement, Ådalen 31 (1969) and Joe Hill (1971); and even detective thrillers, Man on the Roof (1976) and The Man from Majorca (1984), both based on novels by Leif G.W. Persson. The series includes a rare screening of the cinema vérité documentary The White Game (1968), about protests that erupted when Sweden invited pro-apartheid Rhodesia to participate in a tennis match, as well as the short film A Mother With Two Children Expecting Her Third (1970), featuring Vanessa Redgrave. The series also includes the New York theatrical premiere of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival official selection Being Bo Widerberg, an intimate documentary deep-dive into Widerberg’s life and work by Jon Asp and Mattias Nohrborg that explores the man behind the camera through a curated mix of rare archival images, extracts of filming, and invaluable personal accounts from his loved ones, as well as from his film-making contemporaries, such as Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, and Mia Hansen-Løve. Widerberg’s work is ripe for rediscovery; this is the most extensive retrospective of his work ever presented in New York.