Breaking Free: The Films of Anja Breien

The death of Anja Breien in May of this year at age 86 didn’t make headlines in the United States, but tuned-in cinephiles in her native Norway—and other points abroad—would have understood the enormity of the loss. A graduate of Paris’s prestigious IDHEC film school who would be championed and mentored by no less a personage than Ingmar Bergman, Breien’s politically engaged, unapologetically feminist, irony-fluent oeuvre encompasses both documentary and fiction films, perhaps her best known work in the latter category her decade-spanning Wives trilogy; the first entry, released in 1975, depicting three women bailing on their domestic routines for a three-day spree in Oslo, was conceived as a rejoinder to John Cassavetes’s 1970 Husbands. A rare opportunity to discover—or, in new restorations from the National Library of Norway, to rediscover—a giant of Scandinavian cinema.

With the Support of the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York