Everlasting Moments

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

Maria Heiskanen plays Maria Larsson, the put-upon mother whose chance acquisition of a camera awakens a quiet artistry, with Mikael Persbrandt as her unpredictable husband and Jesper Christensen as the kindly photographer who nurtures her talent. Troell, who also served as his own cinematographer, renders early-1900s working-class Sweden in soft, painterly light, framing 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, reading it as a moving testament to the sustaining power of creativity. Gentle, beautiful and deeply humane, Everlasting Moments is a fitting late achievement from one of Sweden's great film-makers — a portrait of a woman who finds, through a simple box camera, a way of seeing that the world had never offered her. Heiskanen's understated central performance and Troell's painterly period light make it a moving testament to the sustaining power of art, and a fitting late achievement from one of Sweden's great film-makers.