Fanny and AlexanderNot For Pleasure Alone Embrace the little joys of life: food, theatre, companionship, etc. Still, art can provide more than diversion and pleasure. For participants of art whether it's as a creator even as a child or as part of the audience, it can be a means through which we make sense of life and work out our questions and despair.
For Alexander's father, the theatre director, the little world (theatre) can at times successfully reflect the big world. The unreality of Hamlet, A Dream Play, imagination, and, say, fairy tales do not preclude that.
Fanny and Alexander come from an environment that prizes imagination. On the other hand, we have Edvard Vergerus who
says imagination is a gift from God and is held in trust for us by artists, musicians, writers, etc., but his true stance on this (truth versus lies) is made more apparent during the course of the film. He fails and refuses to see the why behind Alexander's stories.
Can imagination save us? Sometimes. Surely, it can help us cope.