NOR26 Persona

Marking the 60th anniversary, we present Ingmar Bergman's radical masterpiece on the big screen – where it demands to be seen. Even before the mid-1960s, Bergman had already given cinema some of its most haunting and enduring imagery. With the audacious Persona, however, he pushed his artistry into uncharted territory. Liv Ullmann, in the first of many iconic collaborations with Bergman, portrays a stage actress who has fallen into an unexplained silence, while Bibi Andersson is equally captivating as the talkative young nurse assigned to her care in a secluded island retreat. Thrown together in this isolation, the two women experience a strange, slow merging of their inner lives. Shot by Sven Nykvist in a striking interplay of sharp contrast and delicate light, and acted with extraordinary subtlety, Persona remains a hypnotic and deeply unsettling meditation on identity and the human psyche.