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Winner of four Oscars, including Best Foreign Film, Fanny and Alexander is the culmination of a lifetime's work by one of the cinema's greatest artists, Ingmar Bergman. The story is a rich tapestry of one year in the life of the Ekdahls, a large and well to do theatrical family living in a Swedish provincial town at the turn of the century. The central characters are the two young children, Fanny and Alexander, their mother, a gifted actress, and their grandmother. The film opens with a joyous Christmas. Later the children's father dies and their lives are set for a dramatic change when their mother falls for the icy charms of the puritanical local Bishop. The film goes from bawdy humour to tragedy, and then from the austerity of the Bishop's palace to the magically cluttered and mysterious emporium where Alexander encounters supernatural forces. An optimistic and enchanting evocation of childhood, Fanny and Alexander is, without doubt, Bergman's masterpiece.
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