23/10/2013 - After his 150th anniversary was celebrated in Oslo, film programmes about the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) will screen in Prague, Berlin and Bucharest

Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) – famous to the world, ao for his The Scream (1893) – is now touring Europe, after Oslo’s National Gallery and Munch Museum’s Munch 150 exhibition, which included films about the Norwegian artist, who was inspired by late 19^th century symbolism and early 20^th century German expressionism.

Earlier this month (October), the Artis cinema in Tallinn, Eastonia, programmed a Munch on Film series, including Indian director Dheraj Akolkar’s Let the Scream Be Heard. Here Akolkar, who most recently, in Liv & Ingmar [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2012), looked at the 42-year-long relationship between Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, depicts Munch’s creative process and how the mysteries of his life appear in his art.

Norwegian director Stein-Roger Bull’s The Sun deals with Munch’s The Sun paintings and Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s A Minor Concerto, while Lars Rasmussen’s Munch’s Mothers, illustrates his childhood and his family's importance to his life as an artist, and Karen McGann-Ben Harding’s Munch 150 documents the actual exhibition.

The series was concluded by UK director Peter Watkins’ 1974 feature, Edvard Munch, Norwegian director Anja Breien’sFaces (1971), Sølvi Lindseth’s Dance of Life (1997), Munch’s own experimental films from the 1920’s and Norwegian film historian Jan Erik Holst’s lecture on Munch and the Cinema.

The programme will unspool at the Gaudeamus International Book & Education Fair in Bucharest (November 20-14), as well at Scandinavian film clubs in Berlin and Prague, and two universities in Romania, where UK author Robert Ferguson will lecture on Munch and His Contemporaries (including Swedish author August Strindberg).