Songs from the Second Floor
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25th Anniversary
Overview
Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Songs from the Second Floor is a beautiful and bleak poem tinged in gallows humour by Swedish director Roy Andersson. One evening, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere: a clerk is made redundant; a lost immigrant is violently attacked in a busy street; a magician makes a grave error in his act; a man burns down his furniture company for insurance money; the aristocracy prepares for a grand sacrifice; all the while an endless traffic jam clogs the city as stock brokers rally in self-flagellation. In this series of living paintings, the absurdity of life and our modern world is laid bare.
Why You Should See This Film
Taking home the Cannes Jury Prize, Songs from the Second Floor marked the feature comeback of Roy Andersson after a twenty-five year directing hiatus (filled with short films and advertisement work), sparking a trilogy followed by You, the Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). Themed around the work of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Andersson’s collection of meticulously crafted vignettes combine the austere tableaux reminiscent of Edward Hopper and Pieter Bruegel with grim Beckettian humour and dry Swedish sensibility; a plain look at our strange lives at the ever-lengthening end of days.
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