Alba August plays Astrid Lingren, creator of Pippi.
When she was only nine years old, she lived alone in Villa Villekulla. Well, alone, alone, no, she lived with her monkey Mr. Nilsson and his polka dot horse. “She had neither father nor mother, which It was an advantage, because that way nobody sent her to bed precisely when she was having fun, nor did she force her to drink cod liver oil when she craved mints.”
She is "the strongest girl in the world". She picks up her horse with her friends, Annika and Tommy sitting on it, single-handedly and throws the mean and rude people into the tree.
She dresses as she pleases and feels like it, she combs her hair as she wants. She is free, independent and she is always ready to have a good time. Her name is Pippi Longstocking. and if you read the stories or watched the series (in one of the thousand reruns of it) you always wanted to be like her or, at least, have a friend like her.
Astrid with her son, Lasse.
Today, as adults, we should also want to be like Pippi. "Whether you are a man or a woman, read Pippi Longstocking, and if you are truly brave, try at least one day to think and act like her." says the Danish director Pernille Fischer Christensen who signs the film meeting astrid (premiere March 29), the story of the author of Pippi and many more children's stories, Astrid Lindgren.
"I can't remember my life without Pippi," said Fischer at the 2018 Berlin Film Festival, where her film was a big surprise. As a child, Astrid Lindgren was one of my heroines. I am Danish, but I spent a lot of time in my childhood in Småland, where she grew up. She was in the middle of nature, in the same landscape where she was from,” she says.
She runs free, she dances free, she lives free.
The love for Astrid and her stories was passed on to her by her mother and, as an adult, she began to investigate the author's life, discover how she was able to write and understand children so well.
The answer lay in her past, in her late teens, and among the forests of Småland (south of Sweden) . Astrid grew up in an austere, devout family, dedicated to the countryside, but she stood out from everyone because of how she danced, ran, invented stories. She wanted to travel, to live. So she got her job at a local newspaper, in her town, Vimmerby.
She covered news, like the arrival of the train, that machine that could fulfill her dreams of seeing the world. In the newspaper she fell in love with the director, much older than her, and became pregnant. Since he was in the middle of divorce proceedings, they had to keep it a secret and Astrid had to flee to Stockholm, where she studied typing while her pregnancy progressed. Unable to take care of her, she left her son, Lasse, in a foster home in Copenhagen. She turned down her former boss's marriage proposal and worked as a secretary to save up and visit her son until she was able to join him. The film travels between Småland, Stockholm and Copenhagen.
Between Denmark and Sweden Astrid spent part of her life. By train and boat.
"Astrid herself once said that she would have been a writer if she hadn't lived through these dramatic events as a young woman, but she wouldn't have been famous," says Pernille. The mixture of love and pain that she lived through those years seeped into all her stories, starring children with a tremendously humanistic base.
“Astrid was a pioneer in many things”, says the director. “In all her books there is a message from responsibility, love and forgiveness from which we can learn”.
Muse!
Astrid later married, had more children, and most of the stories she published, including Pippi Longstocking, began with them being told before bedtime. Those lessons to her children later passed to millions of children in the world and still do.
Pippi Longstocking is the most famous of all her creations, the craziest, funniest. Like her we should live and travel. Without fear. As Pippilotta said: "I've never tried it before, so I think clearly she should be able to do it." Well that. Without fear. Be a little more Pippi today.