The New Land

The second part of Jan Troell's Swedish immigrant saga follows the process of the family assimilation in the new land. Karl Oskar and Kristina find their own place in wild Minnesota and face the challenges of building a new life - clearing and cutting trees, erecting a house, farming, a new community, meeting the original inhabitants of the region - every day and the trials of the brutal reality of life in the American frontier, including wars, the strains of a new language and culture, the lure of the gold fields of California, family quarrels, raising children, births, illnesses, and death. The New Land captures the turbulences and dreams of the immigration experience. This is an absolute and devastating film, yet poetic and full of compassion and humanity (pay special attention to the second chapter in the film, a work that almost stands on its own). “What [Troell] has achieved seems no less than a masterly exercise in filmmaking, a rare union of carefully nuanced performances from a cast led by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, a use of sight and sound that beggars, at least by its aspirations, the work of more easily satisfied men and a long but selective narrative as alert to the sins that taint national history as it is sensitive to the small dramas that ultimately seal the course and quality of lives” (New York Times).