How I Went To The Cinema and Never Came Home

By Sara Ehnholm Hielm

In this essay collection, editor and film critic Sara Ehnholm Hielm writes about the movies and dreams that have shaped her. The book begins on the golden beaches of California, where the dream factory and the worshipping of beauty become an indissoluble part of the author’s body. Learning from the Californian ‘godmothers’ Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz who uncompromisingly devoted their lives to witnessing their time and to art, Ehnholm Hielm learns how to see, feel, fight and demand.

In front of her eyes, over decades, the movies change. With The Piano by Jane Campion, she gets to see herself for the first time, and Antichristby Lars von Trier is the first film she wished she had never seen. As the years go by, the American Dream becomes more and more unrealistic. The body gets inexorably older, and women and girls start to take more and more space on the screen. What happened to the love stories in our time? And even more important: what is at stake if you devote everything you have and everything you are to movies, to dreams?

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About the author

Sara Ehnholm Hielm (b. 1968) is a publisher and film critic, living in Helsinki. She has worked as a fiction editor for fifteen years and has also written plays for stage. She was awarded the Swedish Yle Literature Prize in 2018 for her essay collection And the Heart Was Mine. “Defies the ancient call for female silence,” said the prize jury’s motivation.  Hielm’s other essay collection, How I Went to the Cinema and Never Came Home, was recognized as outstanding work by the Swedish Literature Society in 2023.