NOR26 Elvira Madigan

Bo Widerberg achieved perhaps his most breathtaking feat of visual poetry with this luminous adaptation of a true nineteenth-century love story ending in ruin. Consumed by a passion neither can resist, a young circus aerialist (Pia Degermark, who took home the Best Actress prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival) and a married lieutenant (long time Widerberg collaborator Tommy Berggren) abandon their former lives for one another, fleeing to the countryside, only to watch their romantic dream slowly collapse into hardship and despair. Drenched in warm, painterly light and forever tied to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, this landmark of 1960s art cinema Elvira Madigan remains the purest distillation of Widerberg's abiding preoccupation: the cruel friction between personal freedom and the weight of social obligation.