Roy Andersson

Hundreds of commercials made Roy Andersson rich enough to build his own studio and shoot exactly what he wanted there, and the result won the Golden Lion at Venice. He took the title from a Bruegel painting and a pigeon outside his window, and the film is very funny right up until it isn’t. — Sam and Jonathan go door to door through a grey Swedish city where nobody’s life is going especially well, trying to sell joke-shop novelties like vampire teeth, laughing bags and a rubber mask called Uncle One-Tooth. All around them people die mid-sentence, mid-sip and mid-sale, yet the two travelling salesmen, a modern Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, just keep knocking on the next door. — Golden Lion | Venice Film Festival | 2014

Roy Andersson was only 27 when he made his debut, a hit that crosses the Czech New Wave with Scandinavian chill. Over one Swedish summer two teenagers fall in love, while the adults around them have long forgotten how. — Pär and Annika are plainly drawn to each other one Swedish summer, yet neither can bring themselves to say so. The grown-ups around them drink, bicker and keep their marriages going out of sheer habit. These two are the only ones who still expect anything from life. — Interfilm Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1970 Journalists' Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1970

After a flop left him making mostly commercials for twenty-five years, Roy Andersson returned in triumph with a film that speaks the languages of Bergman and Tati. Its stories and colourful characters stumble through love and loneliness into the new millennium, and the humour is all his own. — Somewhere in the northern hemisphere, at some point between the 1950s and now, things stopped going well. A magician’s trick goes wrong and he really does saw a man in half, a clerk is publicly humiliated and sacked for no reason, and an immigrant is beaten up on a busy street. Meanwhile the traffic hasn’t moved in hours. — Jury Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 2000

Fifty short scenes took Roy Andersson three years to build, and together they make a world like no other. The title comes from Goethe, who tells the living to rejoice in their love-warmed shelter, and whether you see a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy depends on the kind of day you’re having. — Short scenes in a Swedish town bring together people from all walks of life. A young woman recalls her honeymoon with a rock guitarist, which never actually happened, and a man wakes from a dream. While a businessman boasts about his success, a pickpocket empties his coat, and over all of it the jazz plays on. — Official Selection - Un Certain Regard | Cannes Film Festival | 2007

Roy Andersson, who won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice with this film, spent years making commercials to fund his own work and builds his sets by hand in a Stockholm studio. Every scene is held in a single, unmoving shot, and every one is bittersweet and funnier than it first looks. — A woman’s voice narrates, moving from one situation to the next. She tells of a priest who has lost his faith but goes on saying Mass, and of two lovers hovering over the ruins of a city. Then there’s a man who stops in the middle of the street because he can’t remember why he left the house. — Best Director | Venice Film Festival | 2019