Release, runtime and language

1986 · 117 mins · Swedish

Directed by

Mai Zetterling

Starring

Erland Josephson, Helene Friberg, Gunnel Broström, Inga Gill, Inga Landgré, Börje Ahlstedt

Set in the tumultuous years of her marriage to David Sprengel, the film follows Swedish author Agnes von Krusenstjerna. In a hallucinatory opening, she is seized in a straitjacket by her husband and two psychiatric nurses during the nocturnal chaos of the Venice Carnival and taken to a city mental hospital, clutching the manuscript of her autobiography, which she calls “her child.” Through flashbacks, the story becomes Agnes’s confrontation with her family as she transforms from a writer of innocent girls’ books into a serious, self‑consuming novelist.