Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1964 • Sweden
Starring Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gio Petré
The title of Mai Zetterling’s boldly iconoclastic debut feature—adapted from a cycle of seven novels by the provocative feminist writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna—drips with irony. In 1915, three pregnant women from varying social backgrounds (Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gio Petré) enter a maternity ward. Cue a swirl of perspective-shifting flashbacks that, with searing psychological insight, illuminate the divergent yet interconnected experiences that brought them there—and that came to a head during one lavish, debauched Midsommar celebration. Wildly subversive in its treatment of sexuality, gender, class, religion, marriage, and motherhood, LOVING COUPLES is as electrifying a first feature as any in cinema history, announcing the arrival of an uncompromising artist in pursuit of raw emotional truth.
Up Next in Three by Mai Zetterling
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Night Games
Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Jörgen LindströmOutrageous and explosively controversial (the Venice Film Festival refused to screen it publicly, while John Waters has called it his favorite film), Mai Zetterling’s second feature is a blazing psych...
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The Girls
Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1968 • Sweden
Starring Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel LindblomMai Zetterling’s cinema reached new heights of exuberant experimentation and fierce political engagement with this pointed and playful touchstone of 1960s feminist cinema. As they tour Sweden i...
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Alicia Malone on Mai Zetterling
In this interview, recorded in New York in 2022, Alicia Malone, author of “The Female Gaze: Essential Movies Made by Women,” discusses Mai Zetterling’s journey from actor to director, her return to her home country of Sweden to direct films in the 1960s, and why her work isn't better known today.
