Winter Light (1963) on Netflix
Tomas Ericsson, ill with a cold and doubting his faith, holds a noon service in a nearly empty church. A fisherman, Jonas Persson, seeks his counsel, and Märta Lundberg offers her love.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.0/1029,923 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes76%
Trailer
Plot summary
On a November Sunday, in a small Swedish parish, Tomas Ericsson, its pastor, is ill with a cold and doubting his faith. Only a few parishioners attend his noon service. Between services he receives the fisherman Jonas Persson and Jonas's pregnant wife Karin; Jonas has grown despondent over a news article about China and the atomic bomb, and Tomas sends him home with Karin, asking him to come back afterward. The schoolteacher Märta Lundberg, Tomas's former mistress, then arrives with food, asks about a letter she sent him, and, learning he has not read it, tells him she loves him and believes he does not love her.
Cast
- Bertha Sånnellas Hanna Appelblad
- Helena Palmgrenas Doris Appelblad (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Winter Light (1963)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The crew could not shoot inside the real Skattunge kyrka church, so it built an interior set, with a roof unlike most film sets, and prop artist K.A. Bergman supplied centuries-old hymn boards from real churches in Forsbacka and Lillkyrka.
SPOILER
Ingmar Bergman planned to use Bach's Sarabande from the Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008, but abandoned the idea as "contrived"; the film has no score apart from organ music.- Cinematographer Sven Nykvist spent one month studying the church's light at different times of day, then had reflectors and screens built to light scenes indirectly and shot from low angles to cut shadows.
- Ingmar Bergman took the rare step of sharing the Winter Light screenplay with his father Erik Bergman, a Church of Sweden minister, and boasted that his father read it three times.
- The story point that Tomas becomes depressed over China developing atomic weapons came from an article Bergman had read, and he acknowledged it reflected his own dread.
- Allan Edwall's character Algot has the same rheumatism, Bekterev's disease, as prop artist K.A. Bergman, who supervised Edwall's performance because of it.
- In September 2025, Winter Light was named to the Swedish cultural canon, a list meant to give Swedish citizens and new arrivals to the country a shared cultural identity.
