Autumn Sonata
A famous concert pianist visits the grown daughter she long neglected, and a single overnight reckoning brings decades of hurt and blame into the open.
Academy Awards, Best Actress and Original Screenplay nominations, 1979
A celebrated pianist visits her daughter after years of distance, and one long night turns into a reckoning. The daughter, who has quietly nursed her wounds, finally confronts the mother about a childhood of absence and coldness, and the mother defends a life given to her art.
The film anatomises maternal ambivalence, guilt, and the way injury passes from one generation to the next, holding both women's cases without letting either off. It gives a therapist an unusually direct look at how a parent and child stage an old grievance. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay in 1979.
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman (1918 to 2007) was a Swedish filmmaker who worked in cinema and the theatre across six decades. His films, among them The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander, return again and again to faith and its loss, to the strain inside marriages, and to childhood memory as it presses on adult life. He filmed dreams and the inner voice plainly, letting silence and the human face carry what characters could not say.
Details
- 1978
- Sweden
- Swedish
- Film