Everlasting Moments

Jan Troell, the veteran Swedish director best known for the 1970s epics The Emigrants and The New Land, made Everlasting Moments (2008) late in his career. It was Sweden's submission for the foreign-language Oscar and earned a Golden Globe nomination. It is based on the true story of a relative of Troell's wife, and it is a luminous period drama about art and endurance.

Maria Heiskanen plays Maria Larsson, a put-upon mother in whom the chance acquisition of a camera awakens an unshowy artistry. Mikael Persbrandt is her unpredictable husband and Jesper Christensen the kindly photographer who encourages her talent. Troell was his own cinematographer, and he renders early-1900s working-class Sweden in soft, painterly light, treating Maria's photographs as small acts of liberation within a life of constraint. The film moves at the unhurried pace of memory.

Critics praised its tenderness, its period detail and Heiskanen's understated central performance, and read it as a moving account of how creativity can sustain a person through hardship. Everlasting Moments is gentle, beautiful and deeply humane, the portrait of a woman who finds, through a simple box camera, a way of seeing that the world had never offered her. Troell's painterly light and Heiskanen's restraint make it a fitting late achievement from one of Sweden's great film-makers, and one of the gentlest films about art the country has produced.