This film is based on the latter two novels of the series (The Settlers (1956) and The Last Letter Home (1959)). It explores the struggles of the emigrants to establish a settlement on the frontier and adjust to life in America.
In 1850, Karl Oskar Nilsson, his wife Kristina, and their three children, along with Karl Oskar's younger brother Robert and Robert's friend Arvid, arrive in what is now known as the Chisago Lakes area in Minnesota after enduring an arduous sea and overland trip from Sweden.
The family initially shelters in a shanty and Karl Oskar puts all of his energy and resources into building a more permanent house. He begins clearing the land of the pine trees, and, with the help of Robert, Arvid, and some of their Swedish neighbors, completes a small farmhouse before winter. At the housewarming party, the assembled Swedish settlers, which include Danjel, Kristina's uncle, and Ulrika, now a close friend to Kristina, discuss whether they regret emigrating. Kristina, feeling homesick, bursts into tears.
Kristina, aided by Ulrika, gives birth to a son, who she names Danjel after her uncle. Ulrika later marries Pastor Jackson, a friendly Baptist minister who lives in a nearby town. Pious Lutheran neighbors attempt to persuade Kristina and Karl Oskar to shun her due to this, but they refuse.
Robert and Arvid leave for the West to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush. After several years, Robert returns alone to Karl Oskar's farm. He gives his brother and Kristina a big stack of banknotes. Having felt that Karl Oskar looked down on him, Robert says that the money is only a small part of what he got for the gold he found.
Via flashbacks, it is revealed that he also suffered a series of misfortunes. After working their way west, Robert and Arvid got lost in the desert while looking for a stray pack donkey. Arvid died after drinking poisoned water. Robert was rescued by their Hispanic guide, who took him to a village in the Sierra Nevada. When the guide caught yellow fever, Robert nursed him, despite being warned of the risk. Before the guide died, he gave Robert a sack of coins.
After spending some time on his own in a small town, Robert exchanged the coins for lighter banknotes and headed back to Minnesota. Karl Oskar discovers that Robert has been cheated, as the banknotes are worthless. Robert is distraught and, having refused to seek medical help for a persistent cough, dies a short time later.
In the following years, Karl Oskar becomes an American citizen and tries to volunteer to serve in the Civil War, but he is rejected because of his limp.
Kristina still misses Sweden, and is glad that her husband won't serve as a soldier and become a murderer. She gives birth to two more children, Ulrika and Frank, after which a doctor advises her that, after so many children, another pregnancy will kill her. Deciding to leave her fate in the hands of God, Kristina continues relations with Karl Oskar and becomes pregnant again . She suffers several miscarriages. She falls ill when the Dakota War of 1862 breaks out.
Pushed out of their territories, the starving Dakota people rose up and killed hundreds of settlers across Minnesota. Among the dead are Uncle Danjel, his eldest son, and his pregnant daughter-in-law. Karl Oskar is by Kristina's bed as she dies. The US Army puts down the uprising, and President Abraham Lincoln approves the mass execution of 38 Dakota warriors, a singular event in Mankato.
Overwhelmed by grief, widower Karl Oskar withdraws into solitude as his children grow up and start families of their own. He often visits Kristina's grave overlooking the lake. Kristina's grave marker reads: "We Shall Meet Again". He tends the plot and can hear hammering sounds from the work of numerous other Swedes who have begun moving into the area.
Karl Oskar dies on 7 December 1890. His children have become more American and forgotten most of their Swedish language. A neighbor, Axel J. Andersson, writes a letter to Karl Oskar's sister Lydia in Sweden to inform her of his death. Included with the letter and visible to viewers is a family photograph showing Karl Oskar surrounded by his many children and grandchildren.
Actress Liv Ullmann said that The New Land was filmed concurrently with The Emigrants over the course of a year.[2] The cast members spent days in the fields to portray farming, particularly for The New Land. Ullmann said that, after three days of this, she began to feel exhausted.[3]
The film was shot at Filmstaden in Stockholm, as well as in Småland and Skåne in Sweden and Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado in the United States, between February 1969 and January 1970.[4] The combined cost of the two films was SEK 7,000,000 (equivalent to SEK73,000,000in 2023), making them the most expensive Swedish films produced at the time.[5]
Release
The New Land was released to cinemas in Sweden on 26 February 1972.[6] The film opened in New York City on 26 October 1973.[7]
The Emigrants and The New Land were edited as The Emigrant Saga and aired on television.[8]
The films were first released for home video viewing in the United States in February 2016, when The Criterion Collection released both films on DVD and Blu-ray. The films had been frequently requested by customers.[9] In 2016, The New Land was featured in the Gothenburg Film Festival.[10]
Reception
Critical reception
The New Land has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 9 reviews, and an average rating of 8.9/10.[11]
Writing for The New York Times, Lawrence van Gelder praised the film as "a masterly exercise in film-making", and complimented von Sydow and Ullman. He wrote that, while the film could be "a reunion with old friends" for audiences that had seen The Emigrants, The New Land could also stand alone.[7] Stephen Farber of The New York Times called The New Land "a shattering film", and asserted that "its portrait of the Indians is one of the most interesting ever caught on film".[12] In New York, Judith Crist said the film demonstrated "poetic and human detail".[13] U.S. novelist Philip Roth was also an admirer of the film, writing in 1974 that "It's the first movie I've seen in years and years where I actually believed in the life and death of the characters. But the rendering of the settlement of the Midwest by immigrant Swedes and their dealings with the Indians and nature, is as good as anything in American literature on the subject",[14] and it was an influence on some of his later work.[15]
Roger Ebert referred to The New Land as a masterpiece in his review of Troell's Everlasting Moments (2008).[16] In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars out of four, praising it for "Superior performances, photography, many stirring scenes".[8] Author Terrence Rafferty wrote that The New Land appears lighter than The Emigrants, but has "a more pervasive sense of danger" and "disquiet", and compared Robert and Arvid to Lennie and George in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.[17] The 1974 American television series The New Land was based loosely on both The Emigrants and The New Land,[18] which Rafferty attributed to the popularity of both films.[17]
Box office
The film was the highest-grossing film in Sweden in 1972 with a gross of SEK 11,815,000.[1][19]
Accolades
The New Land was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in the same year Troell was nominated for Best Director for The Emigrants, the first time a director was nominated in those categories for two different films in the same year.[20]
Max von Sydow was a Swedish-French actor. He had a 70-year career in European and American cinema, television, and theatre, appearing in more than 150 films and several television series in multiple languages. Capable in roles ranging from stolid, contemplative protagonists to sardonic artists and menacing, often gleeful villains, von Sydow received numerous accolades including honors from the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. He was nominated for two Academy Awards: for Best Actor for Pelle the Conqueror (1987) and for Best Supporting Actor for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011).
The Emigrants is a 1971 Swedish drama film directed and co-written by Jan Troell, and starring Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, Allan Edwall, Monica Zetterlund, and Pierre Lindstedt. It and its 1972 sequel, The New Land (Nybyggarna), which were produced concurrently, are based on Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, a series of novels about poor Swedes who emigrate from Småland, Sweden, in the mid-19th century and make their home in Minnesota. This film adapts the first two of the four novels, which depict the hardships the emigrants experience in Sweden and on their journey to America.
Karl Artur Vilhelm Moberg was a Swedish journalist, author, playwright, historian, and debater. His literary career, spanning more than 45 years, is associated with his four‑volume series The Emigrants. The novels, published between 1949 and 1959, deal with the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th century. They have been adapted for a total of three movies, and a musical.
Jan Gustaf Troell is a Swedish writer-director and cinematographer. His realistic films, with a lyrical photography in which nature is prominent, have placed him in the first rank of modern Swedish film directors along with Ingmar Bergman and Bo Widerberg.
Scenes from a Marriage is a 1973 Swedish television miniseries written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Over the course of six hour-long episodes, it explores the disintegration of the marriage between Marianne, a divorce lawyer, and Johan, a reader in psychology. The series spans a period of 10 years. Bergman's teleplay draws on his own experiences, including his relationship with Ullmann. It was shot on a small budget in Stockholm and Fårö in 1972.
Sven Vilhem Nykvist was a Swedish cinematographer and filmmaker.
Hour of the Wolf is a 1968 Swedish psychological horror film directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. The story explores the disappearance of fictional painter Johan Borg, who lived on an island with his wife Alma (Ullmann) while plagued with frightening visions and insomnia.
Monica Zetterlund was a Swedish jazz singer and actress. Through her lifetime, she starred in over 10 Swedish film productions and recorded over 20 studio albums. She gained international fame through her collaborative album with Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby.
Kristina från Duvemåla("Kristina from Duvemåla") is a Swedish musical written by former ABBA members Björn Ulvaeus (lyrics) and Benny Andersson (music). It is based on a series of four novels by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg detailing a family's poverty-driven migration from Sweden to America in the mid-19th century: The Emigrants (1949), Unto a Good Land (1952), The Settlers (1956), and The Last Letter Home (1959).
Shame is a 1968 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, and starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. Ullmann and von Sydow play Eva and Jan, former violinists, a politically uninvolved couple whose home comes under threat by civil war. They are accused by one side of sympathy for the enemy, and their marriage deteriorates while the couple flees. The story explores themes of shame, moral decline, self-loathing and violence.
The Apple War is a 1971 Swedish comedy-drama film directed by Tage Danielsson, starring Gösta Ekman, Hans Alfredsson, Tage Danielsson, Monica Zetterlund and Max von Sydow. The political theme of the film is the battle between nature on the one hand and commercialisation and industrialisation on the other set to exploit and ultimately destroy land and natural resources. The film can also be seen as an early criticism of globalisation as it depicts foreign, and large scale, capitalist investors and entrepreneurs as exploiters working side by side with domestic, small scale, capitalists.
The Emigrants is the collective name of a series of four novels by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg:
The Emigrants is a novel by Vilhelm Moberg. It is the first of his four-novel series entitled The Emigrants. In these he explores the causes and process of the major Swedish emigration to the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and their settling in such frontier areas as the Minnesota Territory.
Unto a Good Land is a Swedish novel by Vilhelm Moberg. It is the second of his four-novel The Emigrants series.
The Settlers is a novel by Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. It is the third and the longest part of his four novels in the series The Emigrants.
The Last Letter Home is a 1959 historical novel by Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg. It is the fourth and final novel of his The Emigrants series. It is the shortest book of the four and has a faster pace.
Johan Allan Edwall was a Swedish actor, director, author, composer and singer, best-known outside Sweden for the small roles he played in some of Ingmar Bergman's films, such as Fanny and Alexander (1982). He found his largest audience in the Scandinavian countries for playing lovable characters in several of the film and TV adaptations of the children's stories by Astrid Lindgren. He attended Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Training Academy from 1949 to 1952. During his long career he appeared in over 400 works. At the 10th Guldbagge Awards in 1974, he won the award for Best Actor for his role in Emil and the Piglet.
Private Confessions is a 1996 Swedish drama film directed by Liv Ullmann and written by Ingmar Bergman. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
Agneta Prytz was a Swedish movie and stage actress who appeared in thirty-six films over the course of her career. Prytz was the wife of Swedish director, Gösta Folke.
Here Is Your Life is a Swedish coming-of-age film directed by Jan Troell. It was released to cinemas in Sweden on 26 December 1966. The film is based on a novel of the same name, the second of Eyvind Johnson's semi-autobiographical series of four novels Romanen om Olof, about a working-class boy growing up in the northern parts of Sweden.
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