Alexander Ahndoril | Granta

Alexander Ahndoril

Alexander Ahndoril is a Swedish novelist and playwright. His best-selling novel, Regissören (2006), about the film maker Ingmar Bergman, was published in translation by Granta as The Director in 2008. In 2009, Ahndoril was longlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Publications

The Director

Alexander Ahndoril

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been had he followed his father’s wishes and become a priest. As actors and crew gather to film this alternative destiny, Bergman tries to draw his father into the process, but quickly finds himself plunged back into the emotions of his childhood – both terrorized by his brutal and dominating father, and desperately longing for his approval – and reality gradually begins to crack and crumble, tipping him into a world of false memories and dangerous fantasies. Compelling and breathtakingly original, The Director mixes biographical fact with a wild kaleidoscopic imagination to reveal the boy and the man behind the great film-maker.