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Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
Jag är Ingrid
Produced by Stina Gardell
Written by Stig Björkman, Dominika Daubenbüchel, and Stina Gardell
Editing: Dominika Daubenbüchel
Music: Michael Nyman and Eva Dahlgren
Release Date: 27 August 2015
Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1
Color: Color
Swedish film critic and documentarian Stig Björkman’s intimate portrait of Ingrid Bergman is one of the best biographical pictures about a Hollywood legend to come along in ages. Focusing on the internal desires and decisions that drove the great star, rather than the simple highlights of her movie career, Björkman provides a frank and revealing portrait of this great and (in her time) controversial actress, which somehow manages to enlarge her mystique while simultaneously humanizing her. Though Bergman lived all over the world during her sixty-seven years, she managed to save practically all her diaries, photographs, and home movies since age six! This wealth of personal perspective enables Jag är Ingrid to feel like Bergman’s own honest account of her life, and not the typical overly reverential tribute or muckraking tell-all by those who knew her.
Björkman chooses exactly the right people to interview about Ingrid Bergman. Most of the talking heads are her four children, who provide an extraordinarily candid, critical, and respectful commentary on a woman they clearly loved and admired despite the fact that motherhood did not seem to be Bergman’s primary interest in life. A couple of major actresses who shared the stage or screen with her also provide some revealing insights, but the majority of the narrative is driven by Bergman herself using her own words. Some of these words come courtesy of archival interview clips, but most come from her diaries, vividly brought to life by the voice of contemporary Swedish actress Alicia Vikander.
Even more than the same year’s Listen to Me Marlon—in which Stevan Riley uses the private audio recordings Marlon Brando made of himself to illuminate the inner workings of the inscrutable actor—Jag är Ingrid gives audiences a rich and eye-opening understanding of a movie star who has always seemed larger than life, but in reality was someone who engineered her life to encompass more than what was expected or considered appropriate for a woman of her time.