Hemsöborna / The People of Hemsö / Die Hemsöer

Johannes Carlsson arrives on the island of Hemsö in 1880 $like a snowstorm on an April evening%. He has been hired as a farmhand by the widow Anna Flod. The ambitious young man soon has operations running smoothly, the widow wrapped around his little finger, and has neutralised her hostile son. Now all he has left to do is beguile his employer into marrying him so he can be the lord of Hemsö ... Thomas Mann called August Strindberg $the greatest mind that Sweden has ever produced%. In his early $open sea prose%, he displayed an unexpectedly folksy, sometimes anticly funny side. Boasting beautiful images of summer in the Stockholm Archipelago and icy winter on the outer strip of sea, the film’s rousing finale is an atmospheric illustration Mann’s observation in $The Magic Mountain%, $yet Hans Castorp loved this snowy world. He found it not unlike life at the sea-shore. The monotony of the scene was in both cases profound%. Whereby Strindberg was not speculating on $life% but rather on $life and death%.