A movie like Everlasting Moments comes along maybe once in a decade. It is a portrait, incandescent and inspiring, of an accidental portraitist. She is Maria Larsson, Finnish emigrant to the port city of Malmo, Sweden, at the dawn of the 20th century.

In Sweden during the early 1900s – in a time of social change and unrest, of war and poverty – Maria, a young working class woman wins a camera in a lottery, and decides to keep it – a decision which alters her whole life. This episodic story inspired by true life offers a profoundly personal look at cultural shifts through the history of one family

"Maria, a working-class woman without pretensions, is nonetheless an artist of considerable gifts. Her medium is photography. Watch how instinctively she frames a fugitive image, like a child gently cupping a butterfly in her hands. She has a keen eye for capturing life and for exalting what she sees, however humble - a gift she shares with veteran filmmaker Jan Troell, 77. His movie shivers and gleams in the winter light of Malmo, where its subject's lucid eye penetrates the mists and fogs that shroud the landscape." —Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Rarely is there a film that evokes our sympathy more deeply than Everlasting Moments. It is a great story of love and hope, told tenderly and without any great striving for effect. It begins in Sweden in 1911, and involves a woman, her daughter, her husband, a camera and the kindness of a stranger? The film reflects the great self-assurance by Jan Troell, whose work includes such masterpieces as The Emigrants, The New Land and Hamsun. All of his films are about lives striving toward greater fullness. He respects work, values and feelings. He stands apart from the frantic hunger for fashionable success." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"Beholding Troell's exquisite images is like having your eyes washed, the better to behold moving pictures of uncorrupted purity and clarity." - Todd McCarthy, Variety

"Everlasting Moments is a masterpiece with a texture and feeling unlike any other movie. The film imbues its harried, haunted characters with a down-home majesty." — Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

"Exquisite"—Wall Street Journal

"Entrancingly beautiful"—New York Magazine