Critics reviews

Stig Björkman's remarkable 2015 documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is one of the most unusual films ever made about a major Hollywood motion picture star. It provides an insight into the complete life of a major movie star. It is a documentary of a sort that is seldom possible to make.

Björkman's biographical textures are supremely tied to place and time, giving the documentary an edge that seldom settles for complacency.

All credit to veteran Swedish critic and filmmaker Stig Björkman for surmounting the usual scissors-and-paste expectations and delivering an intimate, involving portrait of a remarkable woman who blazed her own independent path in love and on screen – a bio-doc with the complexity and texture of a drama to add to its fascinating mosaic of cherished memories and archive titbits.

There isn't a lot here about her films, or great performances, but this is two hours of Ingrid Bergman, much of it rarely seen before. I'm not about to complain.

It's cinephile catnip. For those who love Bergman, the behind-the-scenes images — many taken by her — are particularly delightful for the glimpses they offer of both her professional life (Hitchcock tooling around in a backyard) and personal (notably, the charming home movies of her life with her second husband, the Italian director Roberto Rossellini).

The sadness that shaded [Bergman's] best performances is never far from the surface in Björkman's poignant documentary, which starts with an excerpt from Bergman's diary about the awful year the then 14-year-old had just endured.

Björkman constructs one version of Ingrid Bergman's identity through her home movies, clips of her acting roles, her journal entries, and the testimony of her surviving children and a few peers. Björkman seems aware that his Bergman isn't the truth, so to speak, but he commits to the woman he uncovers, and conjures an atmospheric bubble to allow her to express herself.