Persona / Persona – Geschichte zweier Frauen

Actress Elisabet Vogler has been institutionalized since she was suddenly struck dumb on stage. Nevertheless, she is deemed physically healthy. Young nurse Alma is assigned to care for her. The clinic director feels they’ll do better elsewhere and sends the two women to live in a cottage by the sea. There, Elisabet and Alma forge an intimate relationship full of desire and seduction, treachery and aggression, surrender and self-sacrifice … American writer Sarah Schulman said, “the first important lesbian images in cinema for me were Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’, particularly the moment where their intensity of feeling burned up the celluloid”. The love story provided a plot framework for Bergman’s open cinematic narrative. Infused with dreams, fantasies, and idealized images, “Persona” was not only the director’s most personal work up to that point, but also the first he shot in the Faroe Islands where he later made his home.