About Endlessness
Original title: Om det oändliga
2019 | 78 minutes | Sweden, Germany, Norway
Director: Roy Andersson
Writer: Roy Andersson
Language: Swedish
European Film Awards, European Visual Effects Supervisor
Guldbagge Awards, Best Set Design
Venice Film Festival, Best Director
Ottawa audiences love the work of Swedish absurdist master filmmaker, Roy Andersson. Since the Canadian Film Institute presented his Songs From The Second Floor (2000) at the European Union Film Festival in 2002, local audiences have enthusiastically embraced his subsequent films, You, The Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence (2014). And what's not to love? Andersson’s wry, world-weary, often utterly hilarious take on the absurdity of our times is as refreshing as it is cinematically daring.
In About Endlessness, he again constructs interwoven narratives of various characters as a series of static, poetic vignettes. Through his brilliantly constructed images drift lonely figures searching for meaning: a pastor plunged into a crisis of faith, a psychiatrist closing his office to those in need in order to catch a train, a wan bureaucrat recalling an old childhood friend he thinks he has seen wandering the streets, the strange meaning of a woman's broken shoe, a couple floating Chagall-like over a city in ruins. Philosophically punctuating the vignettes is an unseen narrator offering wistful observations of the state of human experience. Inimitable. Unforgettable. Andersson.
- Tom McSorley
Screenings
FRIDAY, MARCH 27
6:30PM
Ottawa Art Gallery
Buy Tickets
Stay after the screening for Q&A with short film director
sunDAY, MARCH 29
7:00PM
Mayfair Theatre
Buy Tickets
Stay after the screening for Q&A with short film director
Preceded by the short film
Phenomena
An experimental triptych filmed in Super 8 and 16mm over a four-year period, "Phenomena" continues an evolving preoccupation with landscape and celluloid practices. Three scenes are observed: a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa (where the artist lives), a gentle winter thaw on a bog in Eastern Ontario, and the raging Ottawa river during spring run-off.
Preceding Roy Andersson’s absurdist masterpiece, About Endlessness, Phenomena will whisk away one reality and replace it with another; one where time passes in structured vignettes composed of unstructured narratives.
Director in attendance
Penny McCann