Midwinter Sacrifice

Butcher Charles Svensson (Thor Modéen) bets on the horses and wins the jackpot. He finds high society is not immediately appreciative of the newly rich.

A boy's experiences on a foggy day at Öresund, the water between Sweden and Denmark.

The rootless, misfit artist Bengt Hallberg escapes from a mental hospital. The head doctor believes him to be a hopeless case and dangerous for the environment. Bengt looks up Inga Larsson, the only person that matters to him.

Gun and Robert are in love, but both are unfaithful during Robert's military service. For Gun, this results in her becoming pregnant and for Robert an infection of syphilis.

The waitress Monica goes to Västerköping to find out who actually was her father. By aunt Margareta, she has been told that her mother, who died at birth, had four admirers.

In a Swedish village, situated in a rural idyll, a father, mother and little daughter are preparing breakfast on a Sunday morning. The family is looking forward to the boat trip that is to follow. The little girl's thoughts are already completely on the water. But there is no sugar in the house, so the mother sends her little daughter to the neighbor across the street to quickly get some. Two villages further on, a young man is filling up his car with gas so that he can drive to the Baltic Sea with his girlfriend. In their convertible, the young people feel blithe and free on the country road and race towards the village where the little girl is just crossing the street with the sugar to return home.

Britt Malm gets hit by a car on a Stockholm street and is taken to hospital. She is badly injured and must undergo surgery. While the anesthetic takes effect she sees hallucinatory images. This turns into a flashback of what happened Britt before the accident.

Documentary of the Swedish actor/director Victor Sjöström and his work - from Terje Vigen (1917) to Smultronstället (1957) Director Ingmar Bergman is interviewed about his memories of and experiences of Sjöström.

One day when Ruben Stiller is playing in a bath, he gets an alien talking to Nadja, who asks him to find out the fate of Charly's dog. Ruben agrees because Charly's host was Mauritz Stiller, and Ruben is the grandson of Mauritz's brother.

A flute playing. A couple enters a floor with large round spots of light, similar to the large round skylights available at Filmhuset in Stockholm, Sweden. She has a short golden dress. He has a long black cape. Both are wearing masks. More instruments make up the music and now a blazing flame dances instead and we see the woman's face, in extreme close-up. The man caressing her gently. A match burns and fades out. More close-ups of the young woman. Two matches meet and flares up. Later we see the man and the woman again, it is outdoors, the city's water. They look tired and bored, as if the low born during the dance now have relentlessly extinguished. Premiered as a short prelude to Ingmar Bergman's "Persona".

A monologue of a woman who tells about her life, mainly about the men she met, while walking.

Portrait of director Mauritz Stiller, with scenes from some of his best known movies.

Gösta Werner makes an unsentimental trip back to his old student city. gauging it's past and it's future.

During the 1960s, artist Eric Olson embarked on a series of works under the title Optochromi. The vast majority of these were plexiglass objects: most were sculptures although a few are formally closer to paintings. From a cinematic point of view one could describe the Optochromi sculptures as metaphysical colour animations frozen in time – so much so that modern composer Jan Wilhelm Morthenson made his film Interferences (1966), a tribute to 1920s abstraction à la Richter, with the use of Olson’s works. Gösta Werner did something similar five years earlier with Levande färg – only that he mainly circles the sculptures, and contemplates them more than he interacts with them. A respectfully curious distance is always kept.

Werner combines two extremely different theatres of flight and misery: the mountainscape near Oujda where refugees from the Algerian War cross the border to Morocco for safety and respite, and Hong Kong, which was dealing with hundreds and hundreds of thousands escaping the famine caused by Máo’s Great-Leap-Forward policy.