A previously unknown script by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, intended to be part of a collaboration with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, is to be turned into a film to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka, written in 1969, is about a teacher of deaf children who falls pregnant. The film follows her over the course of a few days, during which she gets into a car accident, visits a sex club and goes to dress fittings.

The role was intended to be played by Katharine Ross, who had at the time been nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Graduate.

Wow! Bergman was a feminist for 64 minutes! Suzanne Osten

Bergman’s script was to be his contribution to a portmanteau film with Fellini and Kurosawa, but the collaboration never came to fruition. It was not until Bergman donated his archive to the foundation he set up in his name in 2002 that its existence came to light.

Bergman’s script will be adapted and filmed by Suzanne Osten, one of Sweden’s most prominent directors, and a surprising choice given that Osten and Bergman were openly hostile to each other up until his death in 2007. They were on opposite sides of the cultural struggle of the late 1960s: Bergman was seen as traditionalist, individualist and patriarchal, whereas Osten was one of the founders of the radical, feminist and collectivist Group 8 movement.

They also had personal conflicts. Osten’s mother, a film critic and would-be film-maker, had worked for Bergman on one of his early movies, but could not progress in the male-dominated industry of the time. Osten’s first film, Mamma, was about this struggle and portrayed Bergman in an unflattering light.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ingmar Bergman in 2001, six years before his death. Photograph: Jonas Ekstromer/EPA

Their next clash was in Glasgow in 1990, when Osten’s film, The Guardian Angel – which had won prizes and had been well received at Cannes – had eight nominations at the European film awards.

“I was sure we would get some prizes,” Osten told the Guardian. But Bergman was chairman of the jury and they won nothing. Osten believed he had blocked her film, so she sent him a long letter attacking him.

Osten also tells a story of Bergman warning a friend not to work with her. “He said, ‘Don’t get near her, I will shoot her’”, Osten said. “That was pretty tough … he really did some mean things to me.”



The script took a serendipitous path into Osten’s hands. It was initially offered to the national radio station, Sveriges Radio, with the idea that it would be recorded and broadcast for Bergman’s centenary in 2018. One of Osten’s former students had just been appointed as head of the station’s drama department and offered it to her former teacher, who liked it so much she decided to turn it into a film as well. Osten has already adapted it as a radio play, which will have its world premiere on 6 November on Sveriges Radio.



“At first I was rather reluctant,” Osten said. “I had zero idea what it was. And then I was really enthusiastic when I read it. I exclaimed immediately, ‘Wow! He was a feminist for 64 minutes!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ingmar Bergman on the set of Saraband. Photograph: Pics/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka was written around the same time as Shame, The Passion of Anna and The Touch, films Osten describes as very different to the rest of Bergman’s canon. “They’re so political and open-minded, and of the zeitgeist,” she said.

“When you see his text, it’s very good. Politically, he became very conservative, but as an artist he was still struggling with the existential questions. Sixty-Four Minutes is so openly optimistic and on the woman’s side. It has his sadism and his tension – it’s very good dialogue, for instance. It’s in the framework of his 1969-71 films, but it’s something of its own kind.”

Particularly shocking is the scene in the sex club, in which Rebecka asks a man to have sex with her, telling him “I want it to really hurt”, and later revealing that he had nearly killed her. But Osten said the script is unusually progressive for Bergman, especially in the portrayal of Rebecka and one of her deaf students. “This girl is very vivid and rebellious. She has a body and a sexuality and she goes her own way. It’s a queer motif, a love story, and it’s very modern.”

Osten added that the themes of Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka are echoed in later Bergman films such as Autumn Sonata and his TV series Scenes from a Marriage.



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Jan Holmberg, who runs the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said he was delighted when he found out Osten would be making the film, describing it as “a match made in heaven”.



“They had a difficult personal relationship to say the least,” Holmberg said. “Bergman tried his best at times to hurt Osten’s career, whereas she, from her underdog position, would attack his world view, his privileges, his alleged abuse of power, etc. As it recently turned out that Bergman had written a script on exactly those issues – gender, power, sexuality, politics, etc – during this exact time, I for one couldn’t think of a better director than Suzanne Osten to do it.”

Holmberg described the script as “a missing piece of the puzzle”. “It’s quite on a par with finding an unpublished manuscript by Ernest Hemingway or an unknown painting by Picasso. It’s Bergman at the peak of his abilities, and in the same category as his best work – hardly some juvenile stuff written for the writing desk drawer.”

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter has published two excerpts from Bergman’s script, both in the original Swedish and translated into English.