Directed by Mai Zetterling • 1968 • Sweden
Starring Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom
Mai 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 in a theatrical production of “Lysistrata,” performing to often uncomprehending audiences, three women (national cinema icons Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom) find their own lives and marriages mirrored in the complex, combative gender relations at the heart of Aristophanes’s play. Onstage drama, offstage reality, and a torrent of surrealist fantasies and daydreams collide in THE GIRLS, a slashing, sardonic reflection on the myriad challenges confronting women on their path to liberation, and on the struggles of the female artist fighting to make her voice heard over the patriarchal din.
Up Next in Three by Mai Zetterling
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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...
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Lines from the Heart
Filmed at Mai Zetterling’s home in France after the director’s death, this seventy-five-minute 1996 documentary reunites THE GIRLS actors Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom, who look back on their illustrious careers and discuss their craft, working with Zetterling, motherhood...
