08/09/2010

The Swedish Film Institute announced yesterday that Andreas Öhman’s feature debut Simple Simon (I rymden finns inga känslor) has been selected as this year’s Swedish candidate for the Academy Awards nomination in the Best Foreign language Film category.

Simple Simon was selected among 32 Swedish films that were released in Swedish cinemas since October 1, 2009. The 25 year-old director Öhman is the new wunderkind of Swedish cinema. At the age of 16, he decided he wanted to become a filmmaker, after having seen Magnolia and last year, his seventh short film My Life as a Trailerwon the major Short film award in Sweden (‘Startsladden’).

His feature debut Simple Simon stars Bill Skarsgård (Stellan’s son) as the 18 year-old Simon, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome whose life is turned upside-down when his brother Sam is dumped by his girlfriend. In a press statement, the director says about his film: “In discovering the fascinating and wonderful world of Asperger’s, I felt this was the kind of character I wanted to see on the big screen. Bringing Simon and his universe to life gave us an opportunity to combine an extremely visual world with a very different type of character - someone comic and simple, yet very complex.

Öhman co-wrote the script with Jonathan Sjöberg who also shares the producer’s cap with Bonnie Skoog Fenney (Naïve Film). The low budget film was co-produced among others by Sonet Film. Released last Friday by SF, the film sold over 32,000 tickets during the weekend, supported by rave reviews.

Last year’s Swedish candidate was another unconventional choice: Ruben Östlund’s Involuntary [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erik Hemmendorff
interview: Ruben Östlund
film profile]. The Oscars nominations will be announced on January 25 in Los Angeles and the final Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood will take place on February 27. SF International is handling world sales.