Riches and Resentiments
Fanny und Alexander (dir: Ingmar Bergman, Schweden 1982) © SFI
The 68th Nordic Film Days (November 4—8, 2026) will mark the 125th anniversary of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks with a Retrospective dedicated to family affairs
The Retrospective of the 68th Nordic Film Days, titled Buddenbrooks p:reloaded, will be dedicated to archetypes in Scandinavian literature that influenced Thomas Mann, and their evolution in Nordic cinema.
Two years after a successful collaboration in honour of the 100th anniversary of Mann’s epochal novel The Magic Mountain, the festival will once again work closely with Lübeck’s museums.
Thomas Mann’s sprawling family saga Buddenbrooks, which garnered the writer the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature, was published in 1901. Lübeck’s Buddenbrook House is commemorating that date with the exhibition Family Affairs, which will open on October 30, 2026 at St. Anne’s Museum.
“Scandinavian family tales were the models for Buddenbrooks; they were clear examples because I had in mind a family story, one set in a trading town close to the Scandinavian sphere”; thus explained Mann in 1926 the inspiration for the novel set in his home town of Lübeck. Those influences included works by Nobel laureates Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Knut Hamsun, as well as dramatist Henrik Ibsen, but also the novels of Norwegian writer Alexander Kielland, whose father lived in Lübeck from 1834 to 1836, where he attended the Klügmann school of commerce.
Jörg Schöning, the curator of the NFL Retrospective, says this about the film selection, “Just as in Buddenbrooks, firms and families, money and generations are at the centre of the films. Several of them are based on books that Thomas Mann was aware of and used when he was writing his debut novel. Others carry on the tradition of the Nordic family saga or turn the Scandinavian novel of commercial life into films”.
As such, the selection encompasses adaptation of classics such as The Wild Duck (based on Ibsen), long-term family observations such as Fanny and Alexander (dir: Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1982), and family dramas about power and money such as The Inheritance (dir: Per Fly, Denmark, 2003).
“The Buddenbrooks not only left their mark on literature, the book also created a narrative model that reached well beyond the novel. That leitmotif lives on in cinema’s Nordic family sagas – with new images, other eras, and different societal constellations. The Retrospective of the Nordic Film Days Lübeck makes those cinematic updates visible and opens up new access to Thomas Mann’s work”, says Dr Caren Heuer, director of Buddenbrook House.
The complete list of films in the Retrospective Buddenbrooks p:reloaded will be announced in the autumn of 2026 alongside the full programme of the 68th Nordic Film Days. The Retrospective will also include additional events in cooperation with Buddenbrook House.
Press contact:
Hansestadt Lübeck – Nordic Film Days Lübeck: presse@nordische-filmtage.de www.nordische-filmtage.de
