Screening of Swedish Oscar Contender "You, the Living" by Roy Andersson

Following his Cannes Special Jury Prize-winning Songs from the Second Floor (2000), Swedish director Roy Andersson reprises his trademark dark humor and disciplined simplicity in his latest picture.  Inspired by a quotation from Goethe, You, the Living moves through a variety of vignettes framed from the expanse of daily life, converting living tableaux into fragments of a philosophical inquiry addressing existential strife in an oblique and surreal fashion.  Andersson describes this highly subjective and darkly witty series of 50 portraits of the human race at our present moment in history as a “mosaic of human destinies” on the theme of “how to behave around others.” 

His haunting compositions of blackly humorous despair and depravity brand themselves indelibly on one’s brain, but Andersson’s intense empathy is at the core of it all, no matter how outrageous or somber the situations, no matter how grey his distinctive palette. You, the Living is a triumph of tragicomedy from one of the cinema’s most sardonic imaginations.

In Swedish with English subtitles. 90 min.

You, the Living (Du levande)
Directed by Roy Andersson (Sweden, 2007)
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue at 38th Street, New York City
January 10, 2008
6:30 pm

For more information: www.scandinaviahouse.org

Image: You, the Living, courtesy of Studio 24