Göteborg Film Festival to replace actor in AI edit of Bergman’s Persona

The 2024 Göteborg Film Festival will show an AI-altered version of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona with a new actor edited in. Another Persona will co-star 42-year-old Finnish actress Alma Pöysti as Elisabet Vogler, a role played in the 1966 arthouse classic by Liv Ullmann (now 84), as Deadline reports. Bibi Andersson will apparently remain untouched in her role of Alma, the nurse who cares for Vogler — a famous stage actress who has suddenly gone mute — and takes her in, at which point things get mind-bendingly strange, even in the unedited version.

“What happens to film when AI takes control?” Another Persona’s producers — SF Studios, Gothenburg Film Studios, and The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, as well as the festival — write on the film’s official page. “Over the past year, it has become clear that the new AI technology will change the world of cinema. Will the technology enable more efficient workflows and better movies, or will it lead to artists being marginalized and replaced by machines?”

As their premise notes, American screenwriters and actors have come out in force against AI, making its restriction a central demand in their historic strikes this summer (one of which officially ended today). “It is a struggle that will likely need to continue and involve filmmakers in other countries,” Another Persona’s creators continue. “But what does the AI technology really mean for the art of film? For example, what happens when one face is replaced by another? Who is acting then? These are questions that we need to discuss to understand how filmmakers can relate to the technology.”

The Göteborg Film Festival will run from January 26 through February 4 next year in theaters across Gothenburg, Sweden. The set date of Another Persona’s premiere has yet to be announced, but its producers write that “a conversation about acting and technology” will follow the screening.

“Persona is the most acclaimed film in Swedish film history and one of the most written about and influential films in the world, due to its revolutionary aesthetics, fantastic actors, and radical discussion about technology, identity, and acting,” they conclude. “Today, AI technology sheds new light on these questions. Ingmar Bergman described Persona as a sonata for two instruments. Now we are adding a third.”