The director

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been, had he followed his father's wishes and become a priest. As actors and crew gather to film this alternative destiny, Bergman tries to draw his father into the process and close the distance between them, but he quickly finds himself plunged back into the emotions of his childhood - both terrorised by his brutal and dominating father, and desperately longing for his approval. Gradually the story starts to take shape on the screen, but the director's sense of reality is beginning to crack, tipping him into a blurred world of false memories and dangerous fantasies.

Compelling and breathtakingly original, The Director mixes biographical fact with a wild kaleidoscopic imagination to reveal the boy and the man behind the great film-maker.