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| Liv Ullmann in Autumn Sonata Photo: Courtesy of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival |
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has announced it is inaugurating a Lifetime Achievement Award with Norwegian actress and director Liv Ullmann as it's first recipient.
The 79-year-old star, who is also a UN Children's Fund goodwill ambassador, forged her early career as an associate of Ingmar Bergman - starring in 10 of his films during the Sixties and Seventies. She was nominated for twice nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars - for Jan Troell's The Emigrants, for which she won a Golden Globe, and Bergman's Face To Face. She also received two BAFTA nominations - for Face To Face and Scenes From A Marriage.
Ullmann made the move into directing in 1992, with Sophie, selected that year as Denmark's candidate for the Foreign Language Oscar.
In tribute to her collaboration with Bergman and in celebration of what would have been his 100th birthday, the festival will host a mini-focus on the director's works, screening Autumn Sonata, starring UIlmann, and a rare screening of Cold War-era spy thriller These Things Can’t Happen Here (1950). Both films will be accompanied by a lecture from the Bergman-expert Christo Burman, who is a senior lecturer in media arts, aesthetics and narration at the University of Skövde in Sweden.
Festival head Tiina Lokk said: “The whole body of work of Liv Ullmann can be regarded as a representation of Nordic film culture and she has done marvellous work, both as an actress and a director as well as a woman. She is a strong personality who can set a fine example to many these days, as she succeeded at a time when the film industry hadn’t heard about gender quotas - it was all down to professionality and the extent of the qualities of the person.”
The festival, which runs from November 16 to December 2, has now announced its full programme and you can read more of our coverage here
