Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Jörgen Lindström
Outrageous 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 psychosexual odyssey with heaving Freudian flourishes. On the eve of his marriage to his fiancée (Lena Brundin), Jan (Keve Hjelm) returns to his childhood home—a sprawling estate stuffed with antiques—where he relives his memories of his beautiful, decadent, mercurial mother (Ingrid Thulin) and finds himself forced to confront his unresolved Oedipal longings. Seamlessly interweaving past and present, carnivalesque camp and potent symbolism, NIGHT GAMES functions as both a feverishly perverse family portrait and a serious statement on the tormented soul of a modern Europe reckoning with the demons of its past.
Up Next in Three by Mai Zetterling
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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.
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Maybe I Really Am A Sorceress
Broadcast on German television in 1989, this documentary by Katja Raganelli is an intimate portrait of director Mai Zetterling that includes interviews with Zetterling, David Hughes (Zetterling’s ex-husband and the cowriter of LOVING COUPLES, NIGHT GAMES, and THE GIRLS), and actors Harriet Anders...
