Dardenne Brothers on Bergman island: 'We also like to film women'

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

03/07/2012 - An outdoor performance of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's radio play, The Dutchman - the first of his more than 30 adaptions of Swedish playwright August Strindberg's works, originally broadcast on July 28, 1947 - ended the ninth Bergman Week after 52 screenings, lectures, safaris, performances, exhibitions and you-name-its on Sunday (July 1) on the director's island of Fårö.

"It was rather overwhelming to see this place populated with real people," said Belgian director Luc Dardenne, who - with his director brother Jean-Pierre - were the festival's guests of honour, invited to show and discuss their Cannes-honoured The Kid with a Bike [trailer, film focus] (2011) and their favourite Bergman title, Brink of Life (1958).

"To us, Fårö is an iconic cinema island," Luc explained. "Our films, like Bergman's, are about human relationships - people who are already close, one way or another. Apart from that, I think, we are very different filmmakers." "Except that we also like to film women," his brother added.

Swedish pubcaster SVT screened two of six episodes from Bergman's Video, a series of programmes due to be aired later this summer, where the themes of fear, silence, comedy, death, adventure and outsiders - all represented in Bergman's videothèque - will be discussed by, among others, Woody Allen, Robert de Niro, Michael Haneke, Ang Lee, Lars on Trier, Takeshi Kitano, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

The programme also included US director Robert B. Weide's new Woody Allen - A Documentary (2011), Bergman's last interview with Swedish television recorded a year before his death, and Swedish artist Markus Öhrn's depiction of Bergman in Uganda - about the public reception of his films in Uganda, where they are shown at video shacks in the slums of Kampala and interpreted live by VJs (video jockeys).