When Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel was 9 years old, he became aware that his grandfather was a world-famous director: the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman.
Filled with pride, he boasted about it to his substitute teacher, but he was soon overwhelmed with shame and decided to never mention it again. “I just felt so bad bragging about it, because I can’t take credit for him being my grandfather,” he said in a recent video interview from Oslo.
Thankfully, Tøndel, 35, can now gloat about his own movie accomplishments. His first feature, “Armand,” in U.S. theaters Friday, won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year and was shortlisted for the best international feature film Oscar, representing Norway.
A tense moral thriller with dashes of magical realism, “Armand” stars Renate Reinsve (of “The Worst Person in the World” fame) as Elisabeth, an actress and mother summoned to her 6-year-old son’s school after the boy is accused of inappropriate behavior.
Elisabet, in turn, is the name of the actress character in Bergman’s intriguing 1966 drama “Persona” (played by Tøndel’s grandmother Liv Ullmann), a coincidence Tøndel attributed to a subconscious connection. Yet Tøndel did consciously include a shot in “Armand” that’s an Easter egg reference to Bergman, he said. He prefers to keep the brief homage a secret so audiences can discover it on their own.
Tøndel said he cherished the memories of the childhood summers he spent with Bergman at the director’s estate in Fårö, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. It was a “childhood paradise,” Tøndel recalled, where he watched Charlie Chaplin films with his grandfather in Bergman’s movie theater.
Because the memories were so strong, Tøndel said, he refused to watch Mia Hansen-Løve’s 2021 film “Bergman Island,” which is set on Fårö. “I probably wouldn’t like it,” he said. “It’s like somebody made a film in your house and you didn’t know about it.”
As he grew older, Tøndel tried to get as far away as possible from filmmaking.
“It felt like it had been done quite well in the family, so why should I do it?” he said. Instead, Tøndel studied psychology and then economics, but neither seemed like a right fit, he said. Eventually a journalism course in which he made short films brought him back to cinema.
Once Tøndel enrolled in a proper film school, the reluctant director finally felt as if he’d found his place, he said. For Tøndel, the process of making movies is akin to a mindfulness practice that allows him to feel present. But in order to carve his own way, he hid his family ties.
“I didn’t use my surname in film school,” he said. “As far as I know, nobody knew who I was the grandchild of until, like, the third year. It was quite important for me just to be myself and not be seen through the ‘grandchild of Bergman’ thing.”
Bergman died when Tøndel was 17, long before Tøndel became serious about cinema. “I didn’t discuss Tarkovsky with my grandfather when I was 10 years old,” he said, laughing. Now, he wished he could talk to him, not as a grandfather, but as a fellow filmmaker.
To prevent himself from being influenced as he honed his own cinematic voice, Tøndel didn’t start watching Bergman’s vast filmography until he turned 30, just a few years ago.
That choice also preserved the distinction between his relationship with Bergman as the grandfather who held him in his arms and stimulated his imagination with stories of witches and ghosts, and the venerated director the world knows through his films.
Speaking about Bergman isn’t particularly enjoyable for Tøndel, who’s had to balance his desire to honor and respect his lineage while pushing to be seen as an independent entity.
When “Armand” screened last year as part of Bergman Week, an annual celebration of the director’s work at the Bergman Center on Fårö, Tøndel had an intense exchange during the post-film Q&A that he said he was still processing. “There was one lady who came to me and said, ‘You tried to escape your grandfather’s legacy, but you can’t,’” he recalled. “‘It’s in you, it’s in your film.’”
That’s why Tøndel felt relieved by the positive reception to “Armand,” which he started writing with Reinsve in mind in 2017. They had collaborated on an unreleased short film, but Tøndel was only able to fund the longer project after Reinsve became internationally recognized in 2021.
“It would’ve been harder for me to build myself up if my first feature was a real failure,” he said. “Because then the weight of the legacy would have been quite hard to carry.”
Still, out of the 700 or so interviews Tøndel has done since “Armand” debuted at Cannes, on only one occasion has the reporter not mentioned Bergman, Tøndel said — and that shocked him.
“I hope that, after a while, news outlets start to call me by my name and not as Ingmar Bergman’s grandson,” he added, half joking. “I’ve actually started wondering if I should just change my name to ‘Ingmar Bergman’s Grandson,’ so I can have my name in the headlines.”
