During the early 1900s, Maria, a young working-class woman, wins a camera in a lottery. Her frst impulse is to sell it to buy food. But she decides to keep it – a decision which alters her whole life. She is married to Sigfrid Larsson, an unskilled laborer, quite a woman’s man and a periodical alcoholic. She is already a mother; eventually she will have seven children. Later when Maria needs money again, she seeks up the photographer Sebastian Pedersen, alias “Pif Paf Puf, but he thinks Maria should try the camera at least once. Pedersen teaches Maria the art of photography, and she starts to see the world through new eyes. And Pedersen sees Maria as the talented woman she is. The life of Maria is weighed down because of poverty and hard work. But at night – while Sigfrid sleeps of his drunkenness – Maria develops her pictures in the kitchen. Children, neighbors, cats – everything comes to life in photographs which will last, when all else is gone. As time goes by, Maria’s pictures narrate more and more of the “now” that she lives in – poverty and joys, the outbreak of war, a whole society undergoing change. Maria’s relationship to Pedersen disclose a possible path to freedom. To Sigfrid, this becomes a threat. But the camera gives Maria new strength and arouse a longing in her that Sigfrid can do nothing about. Violent arguments threaten to split the family, but also present opportunities for the family to grow stronger, to develop.

EVERLASTING MOMENTS is the result of an involvement that began as far back as 1986 when Agneta, my wife, in real life met Maja, eldest daughter of Maria, the film’s central character. Maria was a poverty-stricken, working-class woman with seven children who won a camera in a lottery and there after photographed the life of her family and the life around her, through the rest of her life. Agneta realized that this could become a marvelous book and she interviewed Maja up to her death at the age of 92. I, too, realized that this was unique material about life in Sweden at the turn of the 20th century. The description of the importance of photography really gripped me, as I have been a devotee of still photography since I was 14. The fantastic Fellini-like gallery of characters also fascinated me, so did the social perspective. When I grew up in Limhamn it was still a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Malmö, and even though my father was a dentist and I hailed from a different social class than that of my playmates and therefore had an outsider’s perspective, I have no problem recognizing the people and the milieu in which the story takes place. It was for many years a dream for me to make a film that takes place in precisely such an environment as this, a film story that affords me the opportunity of drawing on my own childhood feelings and memories.