Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Lost’ Script To Be Adapted By Osten
On Sunday, Suzanne Osten’s radio adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebekah premiered on P1, but there are also plans for a feature film based on the ‘lost’ script to celebrate the centenary of Bergman’s birth in 2018.
Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebekah was Ingmar Bergman’s contribution for a planned project with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa and centres on a teacher at a school for the deaf, and her quest for sexual and political liberation.
Rebekah feels like she’s on the outside, yet trapped. The story follows her over a few intense days involving car accidents, sex clubs and prisons, during which she begins to question love, work, religion, and her very existence.
Such is the excitement over this ‘lost’ manuscript that Suzanne Osten (The Girl, The Mother & The Demons) has been awarded development support from the Swedish Film Institute to adapt it for the big screen in commemoration of the centenary of Bergman’s birth in 2018. She told Dagens Nyheter:
“Bergman borrowed freely from the French New Wave and Antonioni, but made it his. The script is feminist, queer, gay erotic and anti-authoritarian. It is an incredibly bold, complex and radical script.”
“Rebekah is self-destructive, feels left out and says that she cannot feel. But I think that she has control of the situation… I have many ideas about how to do this, but everything is secret at the moment.”