About

['Winter Light'] is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. [...] The film is the tombstone over a traumatic conflict, which ran like an inflamed nerve throughout my conscious life. The images of God are shattered without my perception of Man as the bearer of a holy purpose being obliterated. The surgery has finally been completed. - Ingmar Bergman

The film is the second entry in Bergman's loose thematic 'Faith Trilogy', with each film acting as a different meditation on the notion of the silence of God.

Winter Light is the Swedish director at his most austere and penetrating. Gunnar Björnstrand gives perhaps his greatest screen performance in the role of a priest tormented by his doubts about the existence of God.

Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist famously sat in a church for a full winter's day in order to watch how the light fell throughout the interior as the sun moved across the sky. The crisp beauty of the cinematography is a testament to their patience and Nykvist's unparalleled ability to capture every detail of the human face. A wrenching and profound experience, not one shot from the film could be removed without compromising Bergman's entire vision.

PG | Mild themes