Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries is one of the masterpieces of world cinema, a key early representative of the European art films that would change how people thought about movies in the late 1950s and 1960s. While the film posits a frightening questioning of life, it ultimately offers hope and redemption to its aging protagonist, and ultimately to us all. Director Ingmar Bergman effectively alternates emotional warmth with coldness to create one of the screen's greatest philosophical character studies. His shot composition is remarkable, particularly his close-ups of legendary Swedish director Victor Sjöström, here playing the elderly professor. The film is full of masterful symbolic imagery and allegorical storytelling. Most important, Bergman makes his film accessible to the ordinary viewer. This is a warm and human film, strongly filled with a richness rarely experienced on screen.