Half a century of The New Land
On February 26, 1972, Jan Truel's film "Nybyggarna (The New Land)" was released in cinemas in Sweden. This film is the second part of the film dulogy "Utvandrarna (The Emigrants)". The first part of the film dilogy was released almost a year earlier.
The plot of the film dilogy is based on two novels by the Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg: "Nybyggarna (The settlers)" and "Sista brevet till Sverige (The Last Letter Home)". These novels describe a group of 16 people who emigrated from Sweden to the United States in the mid-19th century. The fate of this group was typical of 1.2 million other Swedes. Moberg himself began to dream of emigrating to the United States from 1916, when he was only 18 years old, and he mentioned these dreams in several of his early literary works.
Moberg began his literary activity in 1911, when at the age of 13 he won a literary competition organized by a local youth newspaper. In the 1930s and 1940s he vehemently opposed the policies of Nazi Germany, the Greek military junta and the Soviet Union, and his writings were among the books condemned by the Nazis to be burned. In 1971, he publicly scolded Prime Minister Olof Palme for refusing to present the Nobel Prize in Literature to its winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was not allowed to attend the ceremony in Stockholm, through the Swedish embassy in Moscow.
He got an opportunity to realize his dreams of emigration in June 1948, when he moved with his whole family to the United States. There, Vilhelm Moberg began to travel the countryside in search of material for a novel. But he found the necessary material not in the countryside, but in the Saint Paul (Minnesota) Historical Library. These were the diaries of one of the first Swedish emigrants, Andrew Peterson. Peterson kept his diaries from June 23, 1854 to March 29, 1898. The diaries were short but very detailed notes on Peterson's wife, his nine children, his livestock and crops, and his church life. The novel "Nybyggarna (The settlers)" was published in 1949, "Sista brevet till Sverige (The Last Letter Home)" in 1959. Both novels were included in the cycle, united by the common title "Utvandrarna (The Emigrants)".
Work on the films of the dilogy lasted from February 1969 to January 1970. Jan Truel acted in this film not only as a director, but also as a co-author of the script, cameraman and editor. Moberg himself advised Truel in every possible way on the set and, in the end, which is rare, he was satisfied with the film. Actress Liv Ullmann recalled that in order to achieve absolute authenticity during filming, the actors had to do real agricultural work, so that by the end of the third day of filming they were completely exhausted.
Despite the fact that the two parts of the dilogy came out with an interval of one year, the shooting of both parts was carried out simultaneously. The total budget for both parts of the dilogy was 7 million Swedish kronor, which is equivalent to today's 6.8 million dollars. At that time, such a budget was a record for Swedish cinema, but the film's box office was the highest in the Swedish film distribution in 1972.
In early 1973, both films of the dilogy were nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and both obtained this award. Moreover, among the nominees were the film by Ingmar Bergman "Viskningar och rop (Cries & Whispers)" and the picture of Luis Buñuel "Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)". Curiously, the great Swedish-Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann played in three of the six films nominated for the Golden Globe that year. And she obtained a Golden Globe for her role in "Utvandrarna (The Emigrants)". And, meanwhile, according to film critic Nathaniel Thompson, the casting of Liv Ullmann for the role of Kristina Nilsson initially caused a protest, unlike Max von Sydow, who, as the performer of the leading role of Karl-Oscar Nilsson, from the very beginning did not raise any doubts.
Also in 1973, Jan Truel's film "Nybyggarna (The New Land)" was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category. But the American Film Academy, in contrast to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, gave preference to Luis Buñuel's film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." But later Jan Truel's film was awarded the Danish Bodil Award as the Best European Film.
According to the site rottentomatoes.com, 100% of professional film critics gave the film an overwhelmingly positive rating. Moreover, in some of the reviews of American film critics, it is noted with surprise and admiration that the image of the Midwestern settlements and the relations of immigrants with the Indians in this Swedish film is in no way inferior to similar descriptions in American culture. But the opinion of the Russian film critic Igor Lesev on the same issue is exactly the opposite: “Closer to the finale, Truel shows a terrible scene of the murder of a family of Swedish settlers by the Indians, which will descend to the wildest anti-Indian westerns of the 50s. Perhaps everything was like that in Moberg’s novel, I don't know, I didn’t read it. But the decision to show a crucified baby covered in flies, cut out of the belly of a murdered mother, is on Truel’s conscience. The director wanted to cause cheap hatred for the Indians and he did it. However, he is an artist, he knows better."
Be that as it may, moviegoers rated Jan Truel's film "Nybyggarna (The New Land)" rather highly. 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated this film from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Jan Truel's film "Nybyggarna (The New Land)" according to FilmGourmand version was 9,062, which allowed it to take 155th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
