The magnetist succeeds in healing Maria, getting her to reveal under hypnosis the trauma that originally caused her blindness. Maria reacts by falling deeply in love with her healer. But Stenius learns something of

Meisner's past - he reportedly fled Norway to escape charges of rape and fraud - and is relentless in his campaign to have the newcomer discredited. Meisner, who has just become engaged to Maria and is the toast of the town, reacts by challenging Stenius to a medical duel, with Mrs Hofverberg, wife of the town's richest citizen (played by Ingmar Bergman regular Erland Josephson), as the patient.

Mrs Hofverberg is suffering from a large abdominal swelling which Stenius has diagnosed to be a tumour, whereas Mrs Hofverberg herself is convinced it is a dead baby. Meisner's treatment appears to work: Mrs Hofverberg ejects the dead baby and recovers. However, Dr Selander subsequently finds chicken bones among the ejected body parts, a discovery which brings him up against a fierce personal dilemma - the fact that his daughter's beloved saviour is also a fraud - and similarly throws the conflict at the heart of the film into sharp focus: Meisner's methods undeniably work, yet he is equally undeniably a charlatan.

Director Morten Henriksen on set.

The discovery of that theme was what eventually provided Henriksen with the key to making The Magnetist's Fifth Winter into a film, since it tied in with something he had discovered while making his own documentary about alternative medicine.

"What surprised me," says the 49-year-old director, "was that many of the people who really possessed quite unusual abilities nevertheless couldn't help supplementing their skills with greater or lesser degrees of trickery."

Various factors are at work here, he notes. "One of them is that the world of the demi-occult possesses the same mechanisms as entertainment and politics: an audience is there to be entertained - indeed preferably elevated to a state of ecstasy. Complicated issues have to be presented powerfully and simply and there is a demand for novelty and sensation.

"But there's also another factor: healing is closely connected to trust, faith and authority. In order to 'receive the force' from a healer, patients must 'believe' in him mentally - they must have 'surrendered' to him. The Magnetist's Fifth Winter is also about magic and sex... about betrayal and self-delusion."

And, adds Henriksen, about love. "Meisner really sees Maria and Maria really sees him, not as the person that he wants to be, but behind all the masks: she can take them away, so it's a very special meeting. When the story ends, they have all been transformed: they are not the same people they were at the beginning. And that's what love is about - about being seen. That's the finest thing in the world, I guess."

Of course, the links between what the magnetist does, using tricks to get his message across and wrapping his truth in a delicate tissue of lies, is not that different from what any film-maker - any artist - does to get his or her point across to as many people as possible.