The Emigrants

“a new land... a new hope... a new dream”

Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) farms a stony patch of nineteenth-century Småland with his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann), and the land gives back less every year. Hunger, church pressure and neighbors who judge them wear at the household until leaving for America starts to sound like the only sensible plan. Jan Troell films the voyage and the long walk inland at the pace of the work itself, with nothing hurried.