Philippine Reef - California Academy of Sciences, Monday, December 16th, 2024
As tour guides we're constantly talking about Angel Island as being the Ellis island of the West, etc. Immigrants coning through Angel Island obviously had a very different and generally punitive experience than most welcomed at Ellis Island.
These are very interesting and gorgeously done films from 1971 and 1972 that have been unavailable for many, many years.and speak to the American immigrant experience.
Available on Amazon
This monumental mid-nineteenth-century epic from Jan Troell (Here Is Your Life) charts, over the course of two films, a poor Swedish farming family s voyage to America and their efforts to put down roots in this beautiful but forbidding new world. Movie legends Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal) and Liv Ullmann (Persona) give remarkably authentic performances as Karl-Oskar and Kristina, a couple who meet with one physical and emotional trial after another on their arduous journey. The precise, minute detail with which Troell depicts the couple's story which is also the story of countless other people who sought better lives across the Atlantic is a wonder to behold. Engrossing every step of the way, the duo of The Emigrants and The New Land makes for perhaps the greatest screen drama about the settling of America.
"The Emigrants (Swedish: Utvandrarna) is a 1971 Swedish drama film directed and co-written by Jan Troell, and starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall, Monica Zetterlund, and Pierre Lindstedt. It and its 1972 sequel, The New Land (Nybyggarna), which were produced concurrently, are based on Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, a series of novels about poor Swedes who emigrate from Småland, Sweden, in the mid-19th century and make their home in Minnesota. This film adapts the first two of the four novels (The Emigrants (1949) and Unto a Good Land (1952)), which depict the hardships the emigrants experience in Sweden and on their journey to America.
The Emigrants won international acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 44th Academy Awards. It was nominated for four more Oscars the following year, including for Best Picture, the same year that The New Land was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film."
Greg