Persona

Persona is about a famous actress who experiences a nervous breakdown during a performance of ‘Electra’. She abruptly stops acting and even speaking. The crisis proves rooted in her guilt towards her son: she feels incapable of combining her acting career with motherhood. To her, theatre is no replacement for life.

Liv Ullmann plays the actress in crisis, who is committed to an institution and is mute. Bibi Andersson portrays her nurse. Together they leave for an isolated house on the waterside where they become increasingly intimately acquainted – to the extreme.

Controversial

Ingmar Bergman psychologically portrays these two women as they swap identities. Persona would go on to become Bergman’s most successful film and one of the first to explicitly concentrate on female relationships and emotions, which would become his trademark. The film’s themes of abortion and homosexuality meant it was long considered controversial.

Persona has been the subject of an exceptionally large number of critical and academic analyses and interpretations – the film is known as the ‘Mount Everest of film critique’.

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s choice

The 79th edition of the Holland Festival’s associate artist is Icelandic composer, musician and vocalist Hildur Guðnadóttir (Reykjavik, 1982). She is one of the leading, multifaceted composers of film scores, experimental pop and contemporary music working today. Her work, which is often intense, poetic, dark and unpolished, is inspired by a variety of sources from the founders of contemporary music, such as György Ligeti and Kaija Saariaho, to minimal music, ambient and noise. She has collaborated with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Knife and Animal Collective.

The general public knows her work from films such as Joker (2019, also to be screened at Eye), for which she won an Oscar, Tàr (2022) or the HBO drama series Chernobyl (2019). This month, Hedda premiered at the Toronto film festival, the radical adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play with music by Guðnadóttir.