58 TIFF: Retrospective Ruben Ostlund

The 58th Thessaloniki International Film Festival has the pleasure to honor acclaimed Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund, presenting a full retrospective of his work. Ostlund, whose latest film The Square won the Palme d’ Or in this year’s Cannes Film Festival, will attend the 58th TIFF.

Director and writer Ruben Ostlund (born 1974, Styrso, Sweden) quickly earned international praise and established himself as one of world cinema's most distinctive voices. His films smash perfection into a thousand pieces, exploring what lies underneath the surface through the prism of satire and sociology. His camera captures meticulously the flaws of human nature with subtle black humor and remarkable preciseness, thus highlighting the very best and very worst sides of human behavior. The characters in Ostlund’s films are authentic, though flawed and unsettled, brought to extreme situations and confronted with their inner selves, moral dilemmas and life-changing challenges. The effect is exciting, comic and certainly unpredictable, as life itself.

The filmmaker’s extraordinary yet so familiar cinematic world unfolds in his entire body of work (10 feature and short films, both fiction and documentary) showcased in the retrospective of the 58th TIFF:

Feature fiction films: The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), Play (2011), Force Majeure (2014) and The Square (2017). Bearing his distinctive identity as a filmmaker, Ostlund’s feature films brought him to the fore of the international festival circuit and attracted audiences worldwide, offering a bold, accurate insight into delicate themes such as the fragility of human relationships, social conventions and norms, political righteousness, physical and psychological violence, morality and integrity.

Short fiction films: An intriguing study on groupthink and society dynamics (Autobiographical Scene Number 6882, 2005) and an unconventional heist film (Incident by a Bank, 2010 - Golden Bear, Berlin FF 2010) underline Ostlund’s virtuosity within a few minutes.

Documentaries: Ostlund’s early work is dedicated to his great passion for skiing (Free Radicals, 1996), marginal youth (Let the Others Deal with Love, 2000), as well as his divorced parents’ on camera reconciliation (Family Again, 2002).