KinoCult presents: Persona | Persona (1966) by Ingmar Bergman

September 2 | 19:30 | Lumiere Cinema.

Tickets are available at the Izipay counters as well as online at:
https://epaygo.bg/3579222757

“Persona” turns 60 years old and still cannot be deciphered.
The year is 1965. Bergman is hospitalized at the Royal Hospital Sophiahemmet in Stockholm. Exhausted from work, with pneumonia, allergic to penicillin.

“I thought I would never return to making films. But then slowly, very slowly, I began to write ‘Persona’. I think ‘Persona’ saved my life.”
Elisabeth Volger is a famous actress who stops speaking in the middle of a performance. She is not ill. She simply decides to remain silent. She is sent on a retreat with a nurse to the island of Forö, and from there the two women, locked away together, begin to merge into one another. Whose face is it? Whose story is it? Bergman does not answer.

“I feel that with ‘Persona’ I touched on silent secrets that only cinema can reveal,” he says. Liv Ullmann utters only one word in the entire film. Bergman and Ullmann fall in love during the filming and are together for five years afterwards.
Susan Sontag wrote an essay about ‘Persona’ in Sight and Sound, which remains a starting point for any discussion about the film. “To know something intensely means ultimately to exhaust it,” she writes.

60 years later, ‘Persona’ is still not exhausted.

director and screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman
starring: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann
cinematography: Sven Nykvist
editing: Ulla Rygheby
music: Lars Johan Werle
duration: 83 min.
language: Swedish | subtitles: Bulgarian