The Girls(Flickorna)

In Greek comedy Lysistrata , the women of warring states impose a sex strike upon their husbands, as the only way of persuading them to stop fighting. Zetterling’s film focuses on a group of women in contemporary Stockholm who are preparing to perform the play, and draw influence from their characters to use similar tactics on the equally arrogant and chauvinistic men in their own personal lives. The actress-turned-director assembles a veritable who’s who of the finest Swedish actresses, including many of Ingmar Bergman’s favourites, for a humorous, stylistically innovative, yet scathing attack on societal gender roles. Revisiting this classic film on the 100th anniversary of Zetterling's birth, we see how shockingly little progress has been made in the last two thousand years.