The Last Sentence

A remarkable drama set against Sweden's tumultuous political world during the Second World War, Jan Troell’s The Last Sentence is based on the life of Torgny Segerstedt, a leading Swedish journalist of the 20th century. The film chronicles Segerstedt’s extraordinary one-man battle against both Nazism and his own country’s policy of appeasement to Hitler.

The narrative begins at moment during WWII when the Nazis were coming ever closer to the borders of Sweden. With Sweden caught between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, the country's elites chose a policy of neutrality and compliance, with few daring to speak up against the evil around them. Among those who did, nobody was as loud and as uncompromising as Segerstedt. In the eyes of many of his countrymen, his pen was far more dangerous to Sweden than the Nazi sword. Amidst the political turmoil of the times, Segerstedt's own personal life took a dramatic and scandalous turn, as he entered into a very public affair with the wife of a close friend.

The narrative of The Last Sentence is as spellbinding as its message is clear: man has a moral duty to speak out against evil, an obligation that transcends time and geography. Beautifully filmed in black-and-white, The Last Sentence (by renowned Swedish director Troell, whose epic films THE EMIGRANTS and THE NEW LAND made him an international figure in the 1970s) is a gripping and poetic tale of man who risked his life for his beliefs and refused to be silenced.