A unique nonlinear biopic on August Strindberg (1849-1912); it tells in great detail about the life and work of the idealistic Swedish playwright (one of the fathers of modern theater), novelist, and painter. It covers his messy personal life and his revolutionary works of art that challenged the conventions of the time. It was produced and directed by Peter Watkins (“The War Game”/”Edvard Munch”/”Punishment Park”) over a two-year period with the aid of 24 high school students from Sweden’s Norden Folk High School. It’s a result of a work commissioned by the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish TV that was aborted because of a lack of funds, but after doing two and a half years of research and script writing Watkins reached an agreement with the Nordens Fhsk to produce the film as a video course for the high school. The cast is largely non-professional actors. The production values were on the cheap, with the students making the costumes, operating the machines and raising the funds for a professional quality video. The script is written by Watkins, Hedvig Blidberg, Charlie Kristiansson and Niklas Westergren. Considering the mixture of amateur and professionals, the collaborative project turned out much better than these things, probably, usually do. It covers Strindberg as the author of The Freethinker (believed to be the first play he wrote), Miss Julie, Inferno and The Dance of Death. Much time is spent covering the volatile relationship he had with his first wife, the Finnish-Swedish actress Siri von Essen. It also covers his troubled childhood (with his shipping agent father and bourgeois family), his own questionable relationship with his many children, his anarchist and socialist beliefs and his neurotic behavior, many of his more forgotten works (The Red Room, The Son of a Servant and Swedish People at Work and Play), his marriage to the much younger Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse in 1900 and in his last years living in solitude in the “Blue Tower” apartment building in Stockholm.