Released
1987
Runtime
160
Category
Language
Director
Actors
Pelle the Conqueror
Watch it Later
Watch it On
What's it About
With few opportunities to alleviate the miseries of poverty in his native Sweden, widowed farmer Lasse (Von Sydow) moves with his young son Pelle (Hvenegaard) to the Danish island of Bornholm in the 1890s. But instead of finding succor or relief, Lasse is reduced to indentured servitude on a Baltic farm, a cruel twist of fate Pelle is helpless to reverse. They manage to adjust over time, and in that gradual process, young Pelle grows up.
Why we love it
August's Oscar-winning coming-of-age drama portrays the grim realities of late-19th-century peasant life, following the tightly knit relationship between father and son with honesty and heart-wrenching verisimilitude. Bergman regular Von Sydow is terrific as the elderly Lasse, giving a performance that is at once stoic and crushingly sad. Hvenegaard holds his own, too, as Pelle, a pre-pubescent boy who learns to adopt a fiercely independent stance by watching his father's daily humiliations. Long but deeply rewarding, "Conqueror" is a film about bleak lives and mutual human reliance that subtly manages to rise above nihilistic despair.