MovieTime

Roy Andersson has made four feature films in forty years. He made a big splash in l970 with a film called A Swedish Love Story. His second film, five years later, was harshly criticised. So he went off and made commercials for 25 years.

Then at the turn of the century he made a very savage, funny bleak film -- a kind of ode to the Millennium -- called Songs From The Second Floor. In it, the good burghers of Sweden are trying to flee as the world around them collapses and the economy fails. At one stage town officials start to sacrifice virgins.

I'd never seen anything quite like this film.

And various critics have reached for odd comparisons to describe Andersson's vision. He's been compared to David Lynch; to Ingmar Bergman crossed with the surrealists; to Terry Gilliam. I don't think his world view is surreal so much as hyper-real, and absurdly gloomy.

His latest film, You, The Living (in release in Sydney and Melbourne, other states to follow) is a series of linked vignettes, some of them dreams. Indeed it takes its title from a poem by Goethe, about the fleetness of life and the imminence of death.

Presenter

Julie Rigg

Producer

Julie Rigg