When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
A jaded prima ballerina reminisces about her first love affair after she is unexpectedly sent her lover's old diary.
While Bertil Lindström works at the Swedish embassy in Paris, his wife Gabrielle spends the summer alone in Sweden. After a phone call to her, he starts to think of all the things she can possibly be doing separated from him.
A ring passes between a lot of different people, giving the bearer or someone close a new meaning to life. Actors, embezzlers, old ladies and cheated husbands all seem to gain temporary hope from misery and disillusionment.
Two twins, separated at birth, meet again by chance many years later. One is a progressive but insensitive mayor of a small town, the other a clown at a circus.
Sören, a poor tailor with many children, dreams of becoming a miller and buys the windmill of the village with money he does not have.
Theatre director Freddy Alsterberg has failed with his latest operetta. He decides to work his way over the Atlantic. His niece Tusse also stows away on the ship disguised as a boy.
Sam Persson is released from a mental hospital. He goes to Stockholm to meet a man he hates, theater manager Stig Brender. In Brender's office they get into a fight...
A young and spoiled aristocrat is guilty of a hit-and-run accident.
Gösta is a lorry driver and has been married to Birgitta for eight years. Their marriage is only held together by their daughter. Gösta picks up girls along the roads and during a drive to Malmö he stumbles on the singing actress Irene. Gösta is captivated by her romantic presence and her joy of life. Besides picking up women, Gösta is sometimes affected by sudden seizures. His wife is unaware of this.
Gösta Ekman in the role as coat janitor Filip, a dreamer that has failed in life and sees people as the cloths he has in his wardrobe. One-night three guests enter the restaurant, the extensive Viding with his beautiful wife Jane, and the remorseless manager Kurtz. Viding who owes Kurtz money demands his wife to be accommodating toward him. Filip watches her pulling a gun...
A Swedish feature film based on a novel by Fritiof Nilsson Piraten.
A young woman, living in a relationship, falls in love with a married man.
Crotchety retired doctor Isak Borg travels from Stockholm to Lund, Sweden, with his pregnant and unhappy daughter-in-law, Marianne, in order to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. Along the way, they encounter a series of hitchhikers, each of whom causes the elderly doctor to muse upon the pleasures and failures of his own life. These include the vivacious young Sara, a dead ringer for the doctor's own first love.
This quintessential Chekhov drama--his first success--is both comic and tragic. A group of friends and relations gather at a country estate to see the first performance of an experimental play written and staged by the young man of the house, Konstantin, an aspiring writer who dreams of bringing new forms to the theatre.
A terrifying drama about what might happen in a disaster situation. An airplane loaded with bacteriological weapons crashes in the south of Sweden, causing an epidemic.
Gus and Holger are inventors in their free time. One day they realize that they have invented a laugh bomb; a machine that makes all the people around laugh.
Marianne is unhappily married with the rich Arvid Croneman. Arvid has been ill for some time and Marianne has been looking forward to his passing away. However, Arvid recovers. Marianne has had an affair with Lennart Hägg, her husband's doctor. She steals poison from his office and makes sure that her husband gets a poisonous injection that swiftly kills him. After his burial, Arvid's relatives, who lives in the house, treats her with suspicion. Has she really gotten rid of all the evidence?
About a woman and her boring life, based on haiku poems by Sonja Åkesson.
Rönneberga is an old family manor. When Lennart Heijken is born, his proud father buys his newborn a grandfather's clock that will follow him through his life and see him become a student, an officer, a married man, and eventually an old man.
Rikard Adamsson, a young man dreaming of becoming a writer, lives a wild and dissolute bohemian life. A ferocious fighter with a heart of gold and a great taste for women. In the military service he gets in trouble, runs away, returns and is sentenced to prison. Inside he finishes his first novel. However, no publisher is interested.
The story about Gustaf Dalén, the farm boy who became one of Sweden's greatest inventors.
Nisse Ekberg is in San Francisco but wants to get back to Sweden. Not being a completely honest guy, he gets mixed up with another person and assumes his identity.
Harald Handfaste is a 15th century Swedish Robin Hood, who fights against foreign oppression. He becomes the leader of a band of highwaymen and they start dealing with the evil bailiff. However, the bailiff will stop at nothing to catch Handfaste and show the people who is in charge. He even attempts to marry Handfaste's beloved Karin, and when she refuses to subdue, the bailiff decides to execute both her, her father and a monk who has been helping them.
Architect Sture Ahrengren walks out of his job with an architecture firm with the support of his wife Kristina. He gets a position with an old friend, Balstar Ekberg, who has a big engineering job going. But Sture gets entangled in a romance with Ekberg's wife, Helena.
An American gangster of Swedish origins returns to his homeland to set up shop as a morality crusader, much in the manner of the later phenomenon of televangelists. While indulging in behind-the-scene shenanigans including rape and murder, the gangster (played by American Clu Gulagher) preaches to large audiences, using mass hypnotism and show-biz razzmatazz to get his message across. The film also features a brief performance by Per Oscarsson, following his highly publicized "retirement" from screen acting.
Helge Lysvik is a farmers son. He dreams of a future as a musician.
Åke is employed as a singer in a revue tour and his uncle Karlsson becomes the tour bus driver.
Television adaptation of Chekhov's story about the spoiled widow Madame Ranevskaya.
The rich young man Teddy Anker invests his money in the theater at the beginning of the 1920s. Whatever he does becomes a success. He falls in love with a dancer, Karin. He decides to put up a show with Karin as the leading lady, but for the first time one of his shows becomes an economic disaster.
Midsummer Eve in Malmfors in the 1880s. The holiday is celebrated with a big party. Three blacksmiths leave the ironworks and become drifters, seeking out jobs elsewhere. During their travels, they come across beautiful girls as well as jobs in different ironworks, where the workers are organizing, monitored by a brutal police force.
