A documentary by Stig Björkman. In English, Swedish, Italian, and French, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Sweden’s greatest star shines effortlessly through Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words, a nifty compendium of her letters, movie clips, visits with surviving family members, and—best of all—lots of beautiful 16mm home movies, mostly shot by Bergman herself.

Swedish director Stig Björkman, who specializes in docs about classic cinema, gives plenty of room to this treasure trove of archival material. Björkman himself was born in 1938, just after Bergman’s first daughter, Pia Lindström. The doc ignores the movie Bergman made for the Nazis that year, just before MGM’s David O. Selznick summoned her for a remake of her Swedish hit Intermezzo. Bergman’s correspondence was chiefly with the impresario’s wife, Irene Selznick, her vocal coach Ruth Roberts, and another friend the doc doesn’t bother to identify. And it’s read here by rising Swede Alicia Vikander.

As explained by later child Isabella Rossellini and her two siblings from Bergman’s second marriage, to Roberto Rossellini, the actor’s intimate relationship with the camera began with her doting father, who died young. Her then-scandalous affair with the Italian director, while still married to Pia’s father, ended her American career, although constant change seems to be what this peripatetic performer most craved, to the detriment of her children. (They were happy whenever she saw them, so it was convenient for Bergman to think they were always happy.)

The two-hour study exhibits little interest in its subject’s screencraft, or in the kind of working relationships she had with directors as different as Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock. (This changes when she finally gets to the other big Bergman, Ingmar.) It’s more concerned with her most uncertain role, as mother, as underlined by Michael Nyman’s gratingly sentimental score. But this doesn’t matter much; like her family and friends, we’re just happy to spend more time with Ingrid.