08/09/2011

"The main characters are two men: one is a travelling salesman, the other is slightly retarded. It is the salesman who explains to his mate why society is as it is."

Concluding his 'Living Trilogy' of Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pernilla Sandström
interview: Roy Andersson
film profile], Swedish director Roy Andersson has only released brief information (see his quote, above) concerning the final installment, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existance, which is currently shooting for a 2013 release, adding producer Pernilla Sandström to Roy Andersson Filmproduktion AB.

On its latest DVD, Funny Films of the North, Danish film magazine ekko has included a pilot of Andersson’s new film, titled from a detail in Pieter Brueghel’s 1565 painting, Hunters in the Snow. Sitting in a tree, a pigeon is overlooking a snowy landscape crowded with people and is ”amazed that they do not see the chaos getting closer and closer”, according to the director.

There are ”three encounters with death”, he says, describing the sequences that will appear in the finished feature, as well as an army of 60,000 soldiers ”seen from a bar, though, so I need not show them all”. As for his heroes, he had the idea of a partnership for a long time ”like Virgil and Dante, Laurel and Hardy; they are in their 50s-60s, living in a boarding house, loserish”.

Hailed as a masterpiece that became a local blockbuster, Andersson's debut A Swedish Love Story won the Berlinale Grand Prix in 1970. Five years later, his Giliap was slashed by the critics and ignored by audiences. Discouraged, he withdrew from feature filmmaking, but set up his own production company, Studio 24, for shorts, documentaries and commercials.

300 commercials (eight collected Golden Lions in Cannes) and a few shorts later (such as the award-winning Something Happened and World of Glory), Songs from the Second Floor received half a Jury Prize in Cannes. Both Songs... and You, the Living earned a Guldbagger – Sweden’s national film prize – for Best Feature and Original Script, with the latter also picking up the Nordic Council Film Prize.