Rolf Forsberg
writer / director
Here are some posters from a few of Rolf's films
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EXCERPT FROM - "A SHORT MAGICAL HISTORY"
My father, Rolf's family came from Sweden. Cold and well ordered; the Swedish Lutherans were simple and hard working. They did not preach and they were never extreme in their expressions of faith. They enjoyed dances at the Swedish club, letters to the relatives, Lawrence Welk on Sundays, and a beer once a week. My Swedish heritage was the perfect, sober, Midwestern, middle class, grass roots experience. With our Nordic language still being spoken and our Scandinavian food still being served, my young mind was challenged with the concept of history, tradition and a sense of belonging to a culture that was from far away. Thirty years before I was born the sense of being “European” was even more pronounced. For my father, America outside of his extensive Swedish community was almost a foreign land. He didn’t even speak English until he was six. The Yankees called him “turnip head”. But then he fell in love with Shakespeare, just like my mother. He became and actor also, and he left home to seek his fortunes on the stage. And so they met.
EXCERPT FROM - "A SHORT MAGICAL HISTORY"
The true religious mentor of my childhood was my father, Rolf Forsberg: a man who has wrestled his entire life with his own set of struggling faiths. The colorful and eclectic flavors of his pagan-like Scandinavian childhood were so rich and fun, that he was left dissatisfied with the stoic Christianity of the lukewarm Swedish Lutheran church. It was a bland world of coffee, cookies & church basement socializing which left his young spirit very hungry for a religion with teeth. So, as an inspired teenager he tried converting from Swedish Lutheran to heavy duty Roman Catholic. He traded in his sober chapel for a great cathedral and his community hymnal for a soaring choir. So devoted was he to the bleeding Jesus that he adopted an abstinence policy to rival the saints. My father was never a man of moderation and half measures, even then. But he could not sustain the intensity without some sign that he was on the right path. And like all “faiths”, the very nature of belief without affirmation is at the core of ones commitment to Christ. If we had proof that any of it was true then there would be no questions and everyone on earth would have the same belief. But my father was on a search: a search that will last until the moment he dies, and then maybe longer, depending. After a time of fanaticism Rolf gave up his Catholic abstinence (and gave it up he did). But Rolf still had the blood sacrifice of Christ in his bones, and could never escape it no matter hard he searched for a deeper truth to call his own.
Eventually his belief in the sacrifice of Christ became a cultural one, and his devotion to Christian mysticism waned. He struggled with what to do, and wandered through a maze of religious options, studying and reading what ever he could find to help him. He also wandered from Chicago to San Francisco and then to New York. As the world got bigger for him he longed to go to Europe, to China, to India. He became fascinated with the Hindu civilization and began spending time with his Indian friends including the actor Said Jaffrey. He took up yoga and meditation and dove into a study of the Hindu cosmology. Ironically his spiritual experimentation was off set by his growing professional success as a writer and director for a Christian television show called “Life-Time” for PBS. His devotion to the Bible in his earlier life made him quite a scholar of the Old and New Testaments. And his Shakespearean background put drama and power into his pen. The result was some very tasty religious entertainment in an industry where Christian programs were dry as dust. And like most professional writers contributing to the family coffers, my father took the jobs that came his way.
In the early 1950s my father put his devotion to the traditional Judeo-Christian God aside. Dissatisfied with the monotheistic West and the poly-theism of India, Rolf turned further east to the island of Japan, where he found the peace and simplicity of Zen Buddhism. He joined the Midwest Buddhist temple, took up Kendo, sat ZaZen and became the disciple of the most renowned monk in Chicago, reverend Kabose. Suddenly everything about him became Japanese.
Soon after this my sister Linnea (14 years my senior) fell in love with a Japanese man named Ronny Morimoto. He was over six feet tall, the son of Japanese immigrants who were put in a concentration camp during the war. Suddenly Ronny and his brother and sister and mother and father became fixtures in our family. Then the world of our once pristine Italian Swedish heritage became filled with Udon noodles, Koto music and Japanese culture. It all felt correct to my father and he settled into Buddhism for longer than any other religion in his life. Then, on December 16th, I was born.
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Last edited 01/16/2008