10 great European Christmas films

Has Christmas ever been put so lavishly on screen as in the opening scenes of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982)?

The banks of the river flowing through Uppsala are caked in snow. Street lamps are being lit. There’s the sound of sleigh bells in the street. From the annual nativity play, members of the Ekdahl family are returning to the opulent townhouse where the table is set and the Christmas tree is decorated. In a calm moment before their arrival, a maid remarks to ageing matriarch Helena Ekdahl (Gunn Wållgren) that this will be their 43rd Christmas together. The year is 1907.

Told through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman’s epic family saga is bookended by Christmas and Christening celebrations – and the warm red furnishings and gaslit interiors of the Ekdahl family home are much missed in the film’s stark middle section, after tragedy strikes and the lives of Alexander and his sister are cruelly uprooted.

A much smaller cohort, European Christmas films tend to come in different packaging to their brasher American cousins. Old-world customs and tradition dominate, reminding us of Europe as a land of folklore and fairytale. Bergman’s film is itself touched with magical realism: it’s filled with apparitions and the overactive imaginings of a young mind.

As it returns to UK cinemas for its 40th anniversary, we raise a toast to cinema’s continental Christmases.

Fanny and Alexander is back in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 2 December 2022.

Director: Arne Mattsson

Hard to get more Christmassy than a film that offers snowmen, carol singing, sleigh rides and Christmas dinners. It’s a mystery thriller too, which makes this 1947 obscurity from Swedish director Arne Mattsson all but irresistible. The setting is a country mansion, where a family has gathered for the season. The wealthy owner surprises everyone by announcing his plans to sell the place, but the next day – Christmas – he’s found dead.

As most of the potential suspects are played by actors with Ingmar Bergman connections, A Guest Is Coming plays a bit like the Bergman/Agatha Christie mash-up you never knew you needed. Mattsson would return to similar terrain in 1960’s When Darkness Falls, involving a Christmastime murder at a rural vicarage. Surprisingly, both these films are currently streaming on Netflix. 

Director: Wendy Toye

Like a wintry biscuit-tin illustration come to life, this 23-minute riff on the old Christmas song ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ ranks among the UK’s most delightful contributions to the seasonal watchpile. Set in a snowy corner of Edwardian England, it imagines the sheer clutter and chaos that would ensue should a ‘true love’ actually gift his darling ‘12 drummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 10 lords a-leaping, 9 ladies dancing…’ etc etc.

At a time when women directors were all but unknown in the UK, Wendy Toye gravitated towards cinema from a career in ballet, and the snow-globe world of this Oscar-nominated short has more in common with Powell and Pressburger’s stylised ballet films The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) than with the prevailing realist trends in British cinema then and now. The set design is by Ronald Searle, the creator of the St Trinian’s comic strips.

Director: Aleksandr Rou

This eccentric Soviet fantasy is one of numerous adaptations of Nikolai Gogol’s 1832 short story ‘Christmas Eve’, or ‘The Night Before Christmas’. A clear night has fallen in the snow-covered Ukrainian village of Dikanka, but spirits are loose. With hours before the big day, the devil determines to make mischief in the affairs of men – in particular the village blacksmith, Vakula, whose religious art irks him. 

So begins a fantastical fable in which Vakula will trick the devil into flying him to St Petersburg in order to wrest a pair of slippers from the feet of the Tsarina in order to woo the village beauty. There’s carol-singing, sleigh rides and, um, enchanted pierogi that dip themselves in cream and fly into the mouth of a Cossack who’s said to be in league with Satan. The colours are enchanting; the special effects endearingly primitive. The director, Aleksandr Rou, made a series of such fairytales. His 1965 film Jack Frost is another Christmas perennial.

Director: Luis García Berlanga

The comic satires of Luis García Berlanga are something like a Spanish equivalent to Ealing comedies or the screwball frenzies of Preston Sturges. His frames are similarly packed with people and the hectic business of a community; his stories as likely to puncture pretension and pomposity. 

His Oscar-nominated 1961 film Plácido takes aim at performative acts of charity, taking place on Christmas Eve during a provincial village’s local campaign to ‘Feed a poor man at your table’. Berlanga’s cynical farce shows how this communal show of humanity is seized upon by wealthy citizens who are keen for photo opportunities and the prestige of philanthropy, but less enthused about actually rubbing shoulders with the poor. 

Director: Éric Rohmer

Falling snow sets a moral trap in Éric Rohmer’s classic French New Wave drama. Jean-Louis Trintignant’s self-serious engineer, Jean-Louis, is new in Clermont Ferrand when he encounters a blonde woman in church and determines to marry her. But his resolve is tested when, over the Christmas holidays, he gets snowed in for the night at a friend of a friend’s flat. This is the charismatic and opinionated Maud (Françoise Fabian), with whom Jean-Louis spends a long Christmas Eve night filled with temptation and discussion.

Part of Rohmer’s series of Six Moral Tales, My Night at Maud’s is a wry, witty, seasonal pleasure – a smart antidote to the cloying sentimentality of so many Christmas films. You can almost see your own breath in the crisp black-and-white images by Néstor Almendros, the masterful Spanish cinematographer who later shot Days of Heaven (1978) for Terrence Malick.

Director: Václav Vorlíček

Filmed in Bohemia amid carpets of snow, this much-loved classic from Czechoslovakia/East Germany is a fixture in the Christmas TV schedules across much of central and eastern Europe. It’s a live-action treatment of the Cinderella fairytale in which Cinderella herself proves unusually feisty and resilient – at least for viewers only familiar with the winsome Disney version. 

A more literal translation of the title would be ‘Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella’, the plot pivoting on the three magical nuts gifted our heroine by an enchanted owl called Rosie. In turn, the nuts gift her the garments she needs to escape the drudgery of life with her cruel stepmother and to beguile the handsome prince. Václav Vorlíček’s film invites us into its storybook realm with the aid of a memorably romantic theme song by Czech singing star Karel Gott.

Director: John Huston

Fade in on a snow-covered street in Dublin in 1904. The street lamps are lit and the silhouettes of dancers can be seen in the glow of the upstairs windows of one of the townhouses. Horse-drawn carriages bring guests to the annual Epiphany gathering hosted by the Morkan sisters and their niece – a time for merry-making, conviviality and, this year, the return of buried memories.

For his final gift to the medium, an ailing John Huston directed this immaculate adaptation of James Joyce’s short story. Epiphany – the celebration of the magi visiting baby Jesus – may technically be the day after the twelfth night of Christmas, but Huston’s film makes perfect seasonal viewing for its glowing, gaslit interiors; its warm feeling for mirth and melancholy. The final sequence is a moving coda for Huston’s career, seeing Gabriel (Donal McCann) musing on “the living and the dead” as snow falls over Ireland.

Director: Arnaud Desplechin

All the hectic, strained chaos of a large family Christmas is captured in this sprawling domestic epic from Arnaud Desplechin. Catherine Deneuve plays the prosperous matriarch who drops the bombshell that she has leukemia and is seeking a bone marrow donor from among her grown-up children. 

With partners and kids, the bickering siblings – including Mathieu Amalric’s alcoholic Henri – descend on her home in the city of Roubaix on the Belgian border, where longstanding resentments, attractions and sadnesses bubble to the surface as the festivities get underway. It’s a Christmas film such as Robert Altman might have made: full of movement and texture, and attentive to the jostling personalities of its ensemble cast. Desplechin takes subjects that are usually traps for sentimentality – Christmas and terminal illness – but proves less interested in tears than in life’s teeming messiness.

Director: Albert Serra

The story of the three wise men and their journey to see the infant Christ is recast as Beckettian slow cinema in this early film from Catalan auteur Albert Serra.

As the magi travel over hills, down valleys and through a spare landscape – “field and fountain, moor and mountain,” as the carol would have it – Serra’s film tracks their progress to Bethlehem in patient, meditative black-and-white cinematography and with minimal dialogue. It demands similar patience from the viewer, but if you tune into its cosmic wavelength there’s a beguiling absurdity and beauty here. In Matthew’s Gospel, the magi’s journey takes a couple of sentences. In Birdsong, Serra gets 98 minutes out of it, giving the arduousness of this ancient adventure a material weight and physicality. 

Director: Cristi Puiu

This opulent philosophical epic is set entirely in a vast Transylvanian manor house and its snowy grounds over Christmas around the year 1900. At leisure over the festive period, the landowner and his guests – including a politician, a countess and a general and his wife – embark on a series of lengthy debates on subjects including war, religion, Russian identity and European culture.

Cristi Puiu’s 200-minute film has the becalmed pace of a Christmas in lavish seclusion, where the conversation is likely to either invigorate or infuriate. Where many period films attempt to ingratiate themselves to modern viewers, Malmkrog challenges us to keep up with the kind of high-minded discussion that passed for aristocratic entertainment in these pre-technological times. There’s something bracing, even gripping in it.