THE NEW LAND /NYBYGGARNA

In this epic sequel to the 1971 film The Emigrants, Karl-Oskar (Max von Sydow) and his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann), having journeyed to America from Sweden, are now living in the wilderness of Minnesota. While building a farmhouse and clearing and farming their land, they must deal with the brutal realities of American frontier life, including a fierce Sioux uprising and a bloody Civil War as well as the lure of the gold fields of California, throughout family squabbles and the raising of their children across births, disease, journeys, illnesses, and deaths.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1973 Academy Awards and hailed as “a shattering film” (New York Times) with “poetic and human detail” (New York), this film adaptation of the final two books in Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg’s Upon a Good Land series captures the hardships and dreams of 19th-century Swedish immigrant households. With precise, minute detail, Troell charts a journey that was shared by countless other people who sought better lives across the Atlantic. Directed by Jan Troell (Sweden, 1972)

“What [Troell] has achieved seems no less than a masterly exercise in film-making, a rare union of carefully nuanced performances from a cast led by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, a use of sight and sound that beggars, at least by its aspirations, the work of more easily satisfied men and a long but selective narrative as alert to the sins that taint national history as it is sensitive to the small dramas that ultimately seal the course and quality of lives.”—The New York Times

Jan Troell (b. July 1931) is known as one of Sweden’s best directors and cinematographers for such internationally acclaimed films as

Here Is Your Life (1966), The Emigrants (1971), The New Land (1972), and Il capitano (1991). He is married to Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell.