It's not gloomy but moody Lukas

Receiving a letter from Ingmar Bergman congratulating you on your first masterpiece sounds like the stuff of dreams. But that is exactly what happened to Swedish poet-turned-film-maker Lukas Moodysson following his 1998 debut Show Me Love (aka F***ing Amal).

Critics raved about the film, and hailed Moodysson as the man most likely to lead Swedish cinema into a shiny, post-Bergman era. His second critical and popular hit, Together - a sharply observed and ambivalent account of life in a Seventies commune - has heightened this mood of expectation.

While Bergman-bashing has practically become a national sport in Sweden, Moodysson is unwilling to join the game. "I feel sad," he says, when we meet in Berlin. "He's old, and, I think, quite alone. It must be depressing for him to sit in this big house on an island, and read in the papers the whole time that people are happy his days are finally over."

Moodysson has good reason to be sympathetic. Within the Swedish film industry, his reluctance to be seen as the torchbearer for a new trend and his public attacks on fellow film-makers such as Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor) have caused frustration and anger. Consequently, like Bergman, he is as resented in some quarters as much as he is revered in others.

"The boxer Prince Naseem said in an interview that he wasn't that popular in England because he was a winner, and people liked losers like Princess Diana. It's a bit like that in Sweden. People don't want you to get too successful. Quite a lot of people wanted me to fail with Together."

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Moodysson looks tougher than when I interviewed him in Edinburgh two years ago. The floppy hair he had then has been shaved to a crew cut, which, along with his jeans and T-shirt, gives him a vaguely bovverboy appearance that belies his warm, if slightly neurotic, personality. Now 32, he says that he has changed, but only for the better.

"When you are pushed around a little bit by people, you need to answer some questions about yourself. I have grown quite a lot, and have become more sure about what I want to make and who I am." Press interviews help, he says, likening them to psychotherapy. Though being forced to question your motives "can be both good and bad, because you lose a little bit of your innocence".

Innocence, or rather the attempt to recover it, is at the heart of Together, which is seen through the eyes of children. It shows how politics, gender, alcohol, sex, snobbery and dogmatism present obstacles to achieving the state of togetherness, which, Moodysson seems to suggest, is the route to happiness (an appropriate subtitle for the film would be Only Connect). Together ends on a high note, with the commune achieving what Moodysson terms a "realistically Utopian" state. "It is a dream of what could happen."

He condemns film-makers whose work denies the positive sides of life, believing that it is the obligation of every artist to give audiences hope. He says he has tried, unsuccessfully, to open a dialogue with Andersson about his unremittingly dark Songs from the Second Floor.

"I think that when we make that kind of film we are really letting people down. We are almost betraying them. I come to culture to find - almost - the meaning of life, or at least support and comfort and hope. I think that so many of the films that are being made outside that sort of Disney world are too much concerned with putting people down." Sensing, perhaps, that he is beginning to sound like a Pollyanna, he adds: "My idea is not to make happy-happy films where everything is all joy-joy. But you do need some hope."