Today's filmmaker for Female Filmmakers had decades in the movie industry as both an actress and a director. She made incredibly bold work that was ahead of her time, so now is the time to honor Mai Zetterling.
Mai Zetterling was born in Sweden in 1925 and trained to be an actor at the Stockholm Repertory Theater. She started to appear in the film in the 1940s and made waves when she appeared in 1944's Torment, written by the great Ingmar Bergman.
If you appear in a Bergman film, then you were pretty much guaranteed critical acclaim. Working with Bergman on two films allowed her to go to England where she starred in English-language projects throughout the 1950s and 60s. Tired of being beheld in front of the camera, she quit acting in the mid-60s to become a director which was a controversial move. Women didn't direct too often in the 1960s, especially women who had success acting.
Her films were clearly influenced by Bergman who is undoubtedly a good teacher. She also touched on sexual topics which were very ahead of her time in the 1960s. Sex? In the movies? And a woman directing!? The public was clutching their pearls! Her first film was 1964' Loving Couples which was followed by Night Games, but we love a movie she made later in the 60s best of all.
Her 1968 film The Girls starred an all Swedish cast and followed three actresses who are going to act in Lysistrata, the Greek play in which women refuse to have sex unless the men stop fighting. They all find parallels to the play in their private lives. Bibi Andersson stars and has a hot topless striptease!
She directed plenty of work in the 1980s, including a segment in the anthology film Love in 1982. In one scene, Janet-Laine Green takes off her clothes and puts oysters on her body. Now that was a sexy scene that showed us exactly why and how oysters can be an aphrodisiac.
Her 1986 film Amorosa gave us a lot more nudity than her previous work. This film is a biopic about a Swedish feminist named Agnes von Krusenstjerna who is played by sexy Swede Stina Ekblad. We follow her life in the early 1900s in which she began writing novels about female sexuality very openly. Since she wrote about sex, she also had it and Mai Zetterling showed us that!
Her work is truly amazing when you put it in the context of its time. To make films about women taking off their tops and relating to Lysistrata in 1968 really is progressive filmmaking. She was clearly proud of female sexuality and loved to explore what it was that women loved about sex. She found sexuality empowering and she was not afraid to show it.
As an actress, she did dabble here and there. She appeared in three films in the 70s and then returned in the 90s to do three more. She may be best remembered by modern audiences as Helga in The Witches, the kind grandmother. Mai passed away in 1994 after a battle with cancer.
