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The whole world celebrates Ingrid Bergman’s birthday

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- After Cannes, Sweden marks the Swedish Hollywood actress’ 100th birthday on 29 August – Europe and the world will follow

The whole world celebrates Ingrid Bergman’s birthday
Actress Ingrid Bergman

Swedish Hollywood actress Ingrid Bergman’s 100th birthday was strongly marked at the Cannes International Film Festival: she adorned the official festival poster, and Swedish writer-director Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words had its world premiere in Cannes Classics.

But the celebrations continue, and on 29 August – the very day she would have turned 100 – the Swedish Film Institute, which has digitally restored eight of her features and two of her shorts, will celebrate her at Stockholm’s Film House, unspooling A Woman’s Face (1938), one of her best-known Swedish films. The birthday festivities – taking place on the same day as the release of Björkman’s film – are being organised in conjunction with Swedish major Svensk Filmindustri, which will release a DVD box set containing other Swedish Bergman films.

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Bergman cavalcades involving the screening of Casablanca and Autumn Sonata, among others, have been arranged in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö during August and September, while on 26-27 September, Björkman will show some of Bergman’s own films not included in his biopic at the Film House’s Long Live Cinema!, and her Intermezzo (1936) will be shown on an outdoor screen in Stockholm’s Vita Berg Park.

Bergman and her last film, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), were in focus at the annual Bergman Week on the small island of Fårö, in the Baltic Sea – Bergman’s home – which ended last week (28 June). Two crew members who worked on the movie, film editor Sylvia Ingemarsdotter and sound/film mixer Owe Svensson, reminisced about the production, and Swedish author Ulrika Knutson repeated her lecture from Shanghai about “Ingrid Bergman as a Feminist Icon”. 

Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – one of the world’s most important festivals focusing on archive films – was opened on 27 June and will show a Bergman film every day. Her daughter, Isabella Rossellini, and Sweden’s ambassador to Italy, Ruth Jacoby, attended. During the summer, most of her films will screen at Le Cinémathèque Française in Paris; the head of the Swedish Film Archives in Stockholm, Jon Wengström, will drop by on 9 July, after Rossellini. 

According to the Swedish Film Institute, Bergman films are also being presented at such venues as the American Film Institute in Silver Springs and the Toronto International Film Festival. Besides Sweden, Bergman retrospectives are being organised at festivals or cinematheques in Hamburg, Munich, Lisbon and Helsinki. 

Finally, US director James Mangold, whose credits include Wolverine (2013), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and the Johnny Cash chronicle Walk the Line (2005), is preparing Seducing Ingrid Bergman, which will shoot next year, according to IMDb. 

Scripted by Arash Amel from Chris Greenhalgh’s 2012 book, it depicts the relationship between Bergman and US wartime photographer Robert Capa. They met while Bergman was entertaining American troops during WW2, and their romance was partly used for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

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