A nurse and an actress who has suddenly stopped speaking form a deep, intimate connection in Ingmar Bergman’s brilliant psychological drama.

Bibi Andersson gives one of cinema’s greatest performances as Alma, a nurse who cares for Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who suddenly refuses to speak mid-performance. As the actress remains silent, Alma talks with great intimacy about her life, and gradually the women’s identities shift and overlap, culminating in one of the most famous images in all of Bergman’s works. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.

While the relationship between Alma and Elisabet is not explicitly sexual, writers such as Susan Sontag and Sarah Schulman noted the film’s extraordinary intensity, with the latter stating: 'The first important lesbian images in cinema for me were: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona… where their intensity of feeling burned up the celluloid'.