A Ship Bound for India
1947 film by Ingmar Bergman
A Ship Bound for India (Swedish: Skepp till Indialand) is a 1947 Swedish melodrama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, based on the play by Martin Söderhjelm. It was originally released as A Ship to India in the United Kingdom and Frustration in the United States. The film is about the relationships within a family, a subject with which Bergman often dealt in later films, and uses other common devices of Bergman, such as the hard father figure. Birger Malmsten, who plays the lead character Johannes, went on to feature in several later Bergman films.
The film was entered into the 1947 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or, which was known at the time as the Grand Prix.
Plot
The central part of the film is a flashback in which the protagonist, Johannes, after seven years’ absence at sea, dreams of the events leading up to his leaving home.
At that time Johannes (then about eighteen years of age) is working with a couple of other employees under his domineering father, Captain Blom, who runs a small marine recovery operation. Blom is abusive towards his son, disappointed in him because of a physical abnormality in his back, referring to him as a humpback. Blom spends his evenings drinking and womanizing, although his wife tolerates this in the hope that their former relationship might one day be restored. This hope arises from her knowledge that Blom is suffering from a serious eye disease that will eventually lead to blindness and make him dependant on her.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “A Ship Bound for India” is 1947 film by Ingmar Bergman. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ship, Bound and India, not as a finished interpretation.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q761987. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Ship Bound for India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.