EVERLASTING MOMENTS World Cinema

One fine day in 1907 in the Swedish village of Malmo, Maria Larsson (Moria Heiskonen) wins a Contessa camera in a lottery. That camera accounts for the title of the latest film by the Swedish master and Oscar nominee Jon Troell. Over a decode, the family grows from three to seven children, and Maria struggles to keep her home and family together in the face of the Great War , hard times, a workers’ strike, unemployment and a chronically philandering and abusive husband (Mikael Persbrandt) Still, under the tutelage of the kindly village photographer, Sebastion Pedersen Uesper Christensen), Maria enthusiastically masters the camera, producing, from her own darkroom, fragile images of the family cot, the children, her neighbors, village parades, her friend Pederson and , finally, herself. “Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing,” Pederson tells her, on unspoken love in his eyes. “You see a world there to be explored to preserve, to describe. Those who hove seen it cannot merely close their eyes. You can ‘t turn back.” This is a family album, a humane and compassionate series of glimpses into lives we core about and o re grateful to know. And all of it is captured not just through the camera eyes of Maria, but through the affectionate viewfinder of Troell himself.