Based on the 1954 novel Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren, it tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression.

Mio in the Land of Faraway was co-produced by companies from Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union with a budget of about fifty million Swedish kronor, making it the most expensive film adaptation of an Astrid Lindgren book during her lifetime.

[1] It featured an international cast consisting largely of British, Russian and Scandinavian actors, while its filming locations included Stockholm, Moscow, Crimea, and Scotland.

Orphaned by his mother's death and father's disappearance, Bosse (Nicholas Pickard) suffers neglect by his guardians Aunt Edna[2] (Gunilla Nyroos) and Uncle Sixten, as well as abuse from bullies.

Running away one night to seek his own father, Bosse meets the kindly shopkeeper Mrs Lundin (Linn Stokke), who gives him an apple and asks him to mail a postcard.

From a whispering well, Mio learns that an iron-clawed knight from the Land Outside, Kato (Christopher Lee), has been kidnapping children and making them his servants by ripping out their hearts and replacing them with stone.

With Jum-Jum and Miramis, Mio leaves Green Meadow Island and journeys to the Forest of Mysteries, where he tears his cape on the briars.

The Weaver Woman (Susannah York) receives the boys at her house, mending Mio's torn cape and sewing a new lining into it.

Journeying to the Land Outside, Mio and Jum-Jum meet Eno (Igor Yasulovich), a hungry old man living in a cave, and offer him food.

Mio soon discovers that his newly lined cape turns him invisible when worn inside-out, and reclaims his sword with the help of Kato's birds.

These include the hero's travel to a fantasy realm through a magical portal, his discovery of his true name, and his battle against a Dark Lord figure.

In addition, the film's early scenes take the form of an urban fantasy concerned with a young boy's wishful desires and perceptions.

[12]The Chernobyl disaster occurred at the same time that the cast and crew were filming scenes in Ukraine, forcing them to evacuate the area and postpone shooting for a month.

It was also the feature-film debut of Christian Bale, who reappeared in December that year as the NBR-acclaimed lead of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987).

[1] According to an article published by film scholar Christine Holmlund in Cinema Journal, Swedish reviewers criticized it for being "canned Astrid Lindgren" and "an incoherent jumble of landscapes and cast members, badly dubbed to boot".

[1] Another factor was the film's international eclecticism in its cast and settings,[8] which Holmlund characterized as "Anglicizing"[1] and contrasted to the Swedish medievalism of the better-received Lindgren adaptations The Brothers Lionheart (1977) and Ronia the Robber's Daughter (1984).

Following the 1987 festival screening in Norway, the film-industry magazine Variety criticized Mio in the Land of Faraway for its unsubtle handling of Lindgren's text and the actors,[9] although it praised the film's appealing appearance and high production values as well as Christopher Lee's performance.

[9] Following the 2007 DVD release in Britain, the genre magazine Dreamwatch characterized Mio in the Land of Faraway as a "strange, otherworldly film" and an "intriguing curio" from the 1980s,[18] but criticized its sentimentality and its "sugary tone and sub-Tolkien dialogue".

Seeing the film as an attempt to emulate The NeverEnding Story (1984), it summed up Mio in the Land of Faraway as a "tired, imitative and cynical" adaptation of Lindgren's novel.