Film review: A full-scale documentary on misguided artist Lina Niemann

Lina starts with A group of music with improvisational jazz. This is very appropriate, because the documentary about Lena Nieman paints a picture of a woman who has perfectly mastered the craft of acting, so that she can improvise, creating art based on herself. Velgot Sjomann’s film collection “I’m Curious” is a case in point. Movies of this kind are no longer made.
By this I don’t mean films with undecorated erotic elements, but rather art films in which the director and actor work from a loose script or no script, where the role and the special character flow into each other and sometimes become the same.

But when one The film is subjective and experimental, and criticism gets harsher. The acting and artistry of the 20-year-old was ignored and instead (especially two reviewers) the focus was on her “ugly” and “unintelligent” (!) body. In particular, her rejection of “the soulless ass”. It’s impossible not to let the thought wander in Metoo. On the one hand, there was artistic freedom, and on the other, there was a flagrant gender bias. Metoo in The Cultural World of 1968 appears to have had a lonely struggle with Lena Nyman, as her memoir entries also attest.

Director Isabel Anderson has unique insight, as she was the one who edited the Diary and Selected Letters 1962-1974, published in the fall of 2020. The book was centered from 17 bags of written material the actress left behind. Even there, the idea should be to make one’s life an art?

Anderson’s film depicts a wayward woman who is as flexible in her love life as she is disciplined in her work. Her repertoire was wide – drama, stage, theater, children’s films – and she worked with her greatest time, such as Ingmar Bergman, Bo Widerberg and Hasse & Tage. She has to be Sweden’s most versatile actress.

but something Missing. Lena Niemann’s filmmaking, independence, and coaching are also complete. However, I can’t understand who she was in the deep. Actress Alpha Pratt gives the voice to Lena Neiman and appears in scenes devoid of replicas, but seemingly aimlessly (often sitting and staring at diaries) farther away. Not even at the end, in the short clips with the beloved dog Kaxe and in the last letters to Janne’s lover, nothing is hinted at. Nervousness, a feeling of longing for love and loneliness and their displacement. Then all of a sudden I felt so sad that she was gone.