Liv Ullmann, the recipient of the Sarasota Film Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award and the star or director of a dozen films on the Festival schedule, sat down with Sony Pictures Classics president Michael Barker last night for a chat before a packed and fawning crowd.
Dressed in a low-cut black pantsuit bracketed by diamond earrings and killer heels, quick with self-deprecating quips and eager to offer candid, perfectly paced anecdotes, her faded Noweigian accent occasionally taking on the lilting cadences of a woman a third her age (she’s a big fan of the word “whatever”), Ullmann came off as loquaciously eccentric and yet completely clear-eyed about past, present and future. Paying special attention to Ullmann’s triumphs with Ingmar Bergman and failures in 70s Hollywood, Barker and Ullmann traced the actress/directors career from the making of Persona to the psychic impulse that led her to visit Bergman on his death bed. Highlights after the jump.
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A press release arrived today with “highlights” from the lineup for the Sarasota Film Festival, which runs April 4-13. For me, the highlights of the highlights include a program called Face To Face: The Films of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, which will include screenings of a dozen Bergman/Ullmann collaborations, and an appearance by Ullmann, who will be presented with the Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award. Also of note: the Independent Visions Competition, which includes four films that we’ve profiled for our SXSW Preview series (Natural Causes, Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brilliance and Yeast) as well as two films that I’ve been looking forward to: Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and Alex Karpovsky’s Woodpecker.
The full Sarasota lineup will be announced on March 11.
