Cinemateca Portuguesa pays tribute to Swedish post-war director Hampe Faustman

Gunn Wållgren in The Girl and The Devil by Hampe Faustman. Photo: Telepicture Marketing, Ltd.

In November, Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon – one of Europe’s most renowned cinémathèques – hosts a retrospective of six films directed by Swedish filmmaker and actor Erik “Hampe” Faustman.

Hampe Faustman made his directorial debut in 1943, and until his premature death in 1961 (at the age of 42) he made no less than 19 feature-length films. Hailed at the time as Sweden’s foremost realist filmmaker, Faustman – unlike his contemporary Swedish colleagues – often took an open political stand in his early films, as in his most famous film Främmande hamn / Foreign Harbour (1948), a depiction of a mutiny on a ship smuggling weaponry to fascist Spain. A disillusionment of social democratic Sweden in noticeable in his films from the 1950’s and onwards, as in Kvinnohuset / The House of Women (1953) where single women – two of them lesbian –despite the security of the welfare state, remain vulnerable and alienated. The series has been curated by Stefan Ramstedt, a member of the Programming and Access to Collections Commission of the international film archive federation FIAF, and formerly a curator of the Swedish Film Institute.

 – This is to my knowledge the first-ever Faustman retrospective outside Sweden, says Jon Wengström, Senior Curator of the Swedish Film Institute. We are very happy for this collaboration between Cinemateca Portuguesa and Stefan Ramstedt, and we hope that this will spur further international interest in this unjustly forgotten director.

Flickan och djävulen / The Girl and the Devil (1944), Faustman’s celebrated period piece about a young woman (portayed by Gunn Wållgren, whom we later know as the grandmother in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander) possessed by dark forces in 17th century rural Sweden, will be presented in a recent digital restoration. All other films in the retrospective will be screened in rare 35mm archival prints from the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute, most of them struck directly off the original camera negative.

The Hampe Faustman retrospective runs between November 18-29. Read more here: Cinemateca - Hampe Faustman, uma revelação do cinema sueco clássico

More information: Jon Wengström, Senior Curator jon.wengstrom@filminstitutet.se or

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