Profession: Director - Arne Skouen and His Films

by Linn Ullmann

In this book Linn Ullmann discusses the prominent themes, ideas, and issues in Skouen’s films. She focuses, above all, on the way in which Skouen the filmmaker explores his own vision of solidarity and community. In Skouen’s films she finds a dream of the great community - a community that includes everyone, that shuts out no one. At the same time Skouen sows doubt that such a community is possible. He warns against over-confidence, warns against the danger of fighting for a vision if it comes at the expense of other people and what is human.

68 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Linn Ullmann is the daughter of actress, author and director Liv Ullmann and director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman.

She is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature. She returned to Norway in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism.
Her first novel Before You Sleep was published in 1998. Her second novel, Stella Descending (2001) received glowing reviews. Her third novel Grace was published in 2002 and won the prominent literary award “The reader’s prize” in Norway and was named one of the ten best novels of that year by the prestigious Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.
In 2007, Grace was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK. That same year, Ullmann was awarded the prestigeous Norwegian Amalie Skram prize.


Her fourth novel, A Blessed Child, was published in the fall of 2005, and was shortlisted for the Brage Price, one of Norway's most prestigious literary awards. Currently she is working as a journalist and a regular columnist in Norway’s leading newspaper Aftenposten.