Film Forum

Sweden, 1969
Written and Directed by Bo Widerberg
Starring Peter Schildt, Kerstin Tidelius, Roland Hedlund
WINNER Cannes Film Festival – Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, 1969 
Approx. 114 min.

Widerberg engaged with the protests of the 1960s through this period film set in 1931, about a strike at a sawmill that escalated to a crackdown by the bosses, a protest march, and then mayhem that ultimately led to the fall of the government. Told through the perspective of a working family, the drama is complicated by a love affair between the family’s son and the daughter of the factory’s manager. Widerberg mixes tones by blending pictorial beauty with his urgent political drama. The film won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Reviews

“For me the best film in competition [at Cannes] was Bo Widerberg’s ÅDALEN 31... a self-styled synthesis of RAVEN’S END and ELVIRA MADIGAN, it had both the wider social content of the first, and the pure cinematic beauty of the second. But ÅDALEN is more than the sum of these two parts...”
– Richard Roud, Sight and Sound

“Widerberg is an enthusiastic but slightly schizoid director, torn between his loudly stated political activism and a barely controlled passion for visual images so lush they are intoxicating in a numbing way. Curiously, ÅDALEN 31 works just because of this duality.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“In order to portray suffering, hunger, and the class struggle, Widerberg is interested in joy. There is something deeply moving in this hymn to happiness that moves against the dry indictment which its subject might have imposed. Fifty years later, the relevance and modernity of Widerberg’s cinema have only increased.”
– Mia Hansen-Løve