Breien was born in Oslo in 1940. Of 1962 a 1964 studied film at the IDHEC in Paris. Back to his native country and, after several years working on some short films and as script and script supervisor for others, performs in 1971 his first feature film, Rape, which is well received at the Cannes Filmmakers' Fortnight. Already from the beginning, This action-reaction principle is the engine of creation for her.. The film is based on the true story of a man who was tried for a sexual assault he did not commit.. The narrative alternates memories of this with each of the processes that make up the case., exposing the facts and evidence as if we were facing a technical report with a strong documentary aspect. By analyzing in such a millimetric way each of the steps and decisions taken and their impact, both in who sits on the bench and in the women who declare, Breien manages to show the failures of the police and judicial systems and the sexist perspective that existed in all procedures.. The tape, that escapes the temptation of any Manichaeism, It still feels modern and current today..
It took Breien four years to make his next feature, the story of three thirty-year-olds who, after meeting again at a meeting of former students of her institute, They decide to abandon their marital and family obligations for a couple of days to have a good party.. A synopsis that challenges traditional roles, even today, and that was explosive in the mid-seventies. Breien thought of it as a response to Husbands, by John Cassavetes, which had been released a year earlier with a similar plot, but with three friends as protagonists. The Wives is a display of imagination and constant reinvention that is sustained by the interpretive strength of its actresses., his shameless attitude and Breien's translation of all this into a cinematographic gesture. This kind of spoof of one of the sacred cows of North American independent cinema ended up becoming the highest-grossing film in Norwegian history and today it is not missing from any list of feminist film classics..
In 1977 Breien directs The Serious Game in Swedish, adaptation of the prestigious novel by Hjalmar Söderberg, about the impossible love story between two bourgeois people who meet fleetingly over the years. Breien investigates the conflict between choosing security or uncertainty in love, central theme of the novel, but it does so through a game of ellipses and fragmenting linearity, which distances the bet from a classic period film.
In the line of the best Henrik Ibsen, attacks rigid Scandinavian morality again in The Inheritance (1979). Very choral film, which avoids the flashbacks that could have been inserted about each family member, He decides instead to expose these relationships with a dryness in the staging and performances that ends up revealing a subtle sense of humor.. It is one of his most celebrated works, with prize from the ecumenical jury in Cannes.
witch hunt (1981) is the adaptation of a short film from the sixties that for a long time tried to turn into a feature-length film.. La photographie de Erling Thurmann-Andersen, regular collaborator of the filmmaker, Take full advantage of these magnificent landscapes of the fjords and valleys of the west coast of Norway. Actress Lil Terselius dazzles as a woman with liberal attitudes who around 1630 She settles in a small shepherd's village with terrible consequences for her.. Today it is a cult work among folk horror lovers., genre that is on the rise again and that in 1981 It was already attacked with a feminist deconstructionist spirit, as in the case of Breien.
How to dismantle genres is your thing, in 1984 continued in this line with The Paper Bird, a thriller with Hitchcockian overtones that could be considered a dialogue from across the street with the insidious atmospheres of the Roman Polanski and Brian De Palma of the seventies. Breien discovers relationships between the characters that point to sexual abuse in the family nucleus, that the director decides to openly denounce by playing with the codes of eroticization of women in noir.
Beneath the thematic and stylistic diversity of Breien's filmography, one can see the desire to respond to the zeitgeist of the moment through the exercise of cinematographic language., always playing with their conventions and expectations to end up offering alternatives to those established genres that are very stimulating. Like many filmmakers who today we consider feminists, She wasn't interested in this label., But in every interview she offered, she kept mentioning the importance of these stories being told from a woman's point of view and that no man could have told them that way.. His cinema must be understood from that perspective., as diverse on its surface as it is homogeneous at its core. This retrospective brings together his first six full-length films, the most stimulating stage of his work. All copies are presented with digitizations carried out by the National Library of Norway.
11.04.26 SATURDAY / 18.00 h
12.04.26 SUNDAY / 20.30 h
The wives
Wives
ANJA KNITTING. Norway. 1975. VOS SPANISH. Color. 85′. DCP.
Int. Anne Marie Ottersen, Katja Medbøe, Frøydis Armand.
What would happen if women started behaving like men?? And if they got out of control instead of returning home and to their responsibilities? This film is about three women who quit their jobs, the husband and children to embark on a few days of debauchery, challenging traditional roles.
