The story of Ingmar Bergman and Fåro

For Ingmar Bergman, it was love at first sight.

It was April 1960 and the director was scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly, an intense family drama set on a remote island. There was talk of shooting it in the Orkneys, but with his backers fearing an escalation in costs the further the location strayed from Sweden, Bergman decided to try the remote island of Fårö, situated just northeast of Gotland, off Sweden’s Baltic coast. As soon as Bergman set foot on the island, famous for its stark, elemental landscape, he knew that he had found not only his location but something much more profound.

‘You could say I had found a home, a true home,’ he said later of his first encounter with Fårö.

Bergman married five times and was romantically linked to numerous women, but Fårö was the love he remained faithful to for the rest of his life. It would be the place where his creative and personal lives intertwined, where his children, wives, lovers and friends would spend time with him. He went on to shoot six further films there, as well as two documentaries about life on the island. He began to put down roots there in 1966, when he returned with the actress Liv Ullmann to shoot Persona. He built the house “Hammars” by the sea, close to the place where they had fallen in love and shot the film. Over time, he would build or renovate further properties on the island before settling on Fårö permanently in 2003. He died there four years later, aged 89, on 30 July 2007.

From 1960 onwards, Fårö would become inextricably linked with Bergman’s work, in the same way that New York would later be synonymous with Woody Allen (a fervent disciple of Bergman’s). Its harsh, uncompromising beauty resonated with Bergman’s unflinching depiction of the human condition and his tormented relationship with God and religion. To say that Fårö became a central character in Bergman’s films would be no overstatement.

As well as the films he shot here, Bergman worked intensely on numerous screenplays. The isolation of Fårö and the constant rhythms of the Baltic provided unceasing inspiration to a man who not only boasted a prodigious film output but was also a prolific theatre director. The barn at “Dämba”, his second house on the island, was converted into a private cinema where he held daily screenings at 3pm sharp. Befitting a man of enormous contradictions, the movies he watched there ranged far beyond the arthouse fare for which he was famous, and his TV consumption notably included Sex and the City and the Muppets.

A Bergman tourism industry has evolved on the island, and it began during the director’s lifetime in unpromising fashion (locals, aware of his love of privacy, would direct hopeful visitors to wherever the director wasn’t), but has flourished since his death. Bergman fans can tour Hammars, where he lived and died, and read the notes and scribbles he left around the house and see the marks on the door of his office where good days he spent with Ullmann were annotated with a red heart and bad ones a black cross.

Death has done little to diminish Bergman’s influence, and his association with the island. This is palpable on Fårö itself, which holds an annual Bergman Week in midsummer when the island’s resident population of 500 is swelled by several thousand and where the Bergman Estate – co-run by Linn, his daughter by Liv Ullmann, and funded by Norwegian archaeologist Hans Gude Gudesen – carefully curates his legacy.

It’s a legacy which runs far beyond the shores of the island. It’s evident in the work of current filmmakers such as Noah Baumbach, who in 2019 wrote and directed Marriage Story – strongly influenced by Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – after spending time on Fårö. Even more obviously, there is 2021’s Bergman Island, starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, who also found inspiration on the island and shot the movie there.

Clearly the island soothed Bergman’s anguished soul. He once said of it, ‘Ever since my early childhood, I have felt rootless wherever I’ve been. It is only since I came to Fårö that I have felt at home in the world.’

Despite all his myriad achievements, his feat of having brought Fårö’s remote, inspiring beauty to a wider audience might yet prove to be Bergman’s most enduring legacy.

John Naughton has written for GQ, Empire and Radio Times as well as several national and international newspapers. He co-authored the book, Movies: A Crash Course.