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Prison Letters is part of a larger project in which Lene Berg explores the life and destiny of her father, director and writer Arnljot Berg (1931-1982), and their relationship.
The film is based on the correspondence between Arnljot Berg and his two youngest children while he was imprisoned in the notorious La Santé prison in Paris in 1975-1976, accused of having killed his third wife, Evelyne Zammit Berg, Lene Berg’s stepmother.
The film is composed by a selection of the original letters combined with newspaper clippings and children’s drawings. Berg’s younger brother Marius Sheamus Berg reads her father’s letters and a young girl, Ingrid Olivia Bjerknes, reads those that nine-year-old Lene Berg sent to him.
Prison Letters was first shown as part of Lene Berg’s Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall 2022.
Lene Berg, born 1965, is a Norwegian film director and visual artist based in Berlin and Oslo. Her main media is film and moving image, but her artistic praxis also includes installation, collage, photography, and text; and she has produced a number of projects in public space. She studied film at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm and has directed four independently produced feature films as well as a number of short films and mixed-media artworks and installations for galleries, museums, and public spaces. Berg’s autobiographical film False Belief premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and was nominated for the Amnesty and Teddy Award. She represented Norway in the 55th Venice Biennale with the film Dirty Young Loose (2013). In 2022 she did the Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, which is considered the most important solo presentation of a Norwegian artist in the country. In 2023 she published her first novel, Fra far/From father at Kolon.
Berg’s work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Art in General, New York. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions and biennales such as Manifesta; the Biennale of Sydney; the Taipei Biennial; Contour Mechelen and Transmediale Berlin.
