Alice and Me is a film about a strong woman who has fought her own battle against society’s prejudice about how a woman should live her life. Alice is over 90 years old but in the limelight, were she has been for more than sixty years, she is still as lively as ever.
Alice Timander was the first female dentist in Sweden. A controversial person who’s obsession it is to be seen and loved and to be a media celebrity at all cost. Her facade is the incarnation of a shallow beautiful blonde but behind that mask lies a hard working professional with strong opinions and revolutionary ideas. In the 1960s the Swedish Dentist Association wanted to ban her when she was seen sunbathing in a bikini. Her reply to them was to wear an even smaller one.
Alice has many depths; a very driven workingwoman whom no one can push around but she is also Alice, the little girl, who longs to be loved. These two opposites have controlled her whole colourful, dramatic and controversial life.
Alice has always loved the theatre and when she was young she tried on numerous occasions to get a place at the theatre school to train as an actress. She failed to make it to the stage but she created her own platform and started to attend the grand opening nights at many of Stockholm’s Theatres. So instead of becoming an actress she became the Queen of the Theatre’s Entrance Hall where she was unbeatable with her beauty and her crazy outfits. She created the most extraordinary dresses of grass and ice cream paper and she never failed to surprise the public. Soon she became the darling of the media.
Her photo was shown in the weekly gossip papers and her life was the subject of headline news in the evening papers.
She, Alice, became the scandalous blonde that people gasped over and sometimes made jokes about.
Sixty years have now passed since she became a celebrity and she is still the grand old lady in the world of the fame and beauty. There is no party without Alice.
Today we live in a world were more and more young people could do almost any thing to be discovered by the media and become a celebrity. The reality shows are a perfect example of that phenomenon.
Alice’s story is about the world in the limelight, with all its contradictions, but it is also about her alienation, about her as an outsider and how far a human being is prepared to go in the quest for love.
Alice and Me is a film about one of Sweden’s most fascinating women with it’s own photographic archive material that goes back more than 60 years.
Nominated for a Guldbagge (Swedish academy awards) Best Documentary 2007
The film was screened on following festivals:
2007
Nordisk Panorama, Oulo
National Film Center + Osaka European Film Festival, Japan
Balkankult, Serbien
Eurodok, Oslo
Links
SvD (SWE)
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