In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund

Swedish director Ruben Östlund began his career in the 1990s directing skiing films before moving on to shorts and features that have earned international acclaim over the last decade. His new film, Force Majeure (2014) won the Grand Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival and was Sweden’s 2014 submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Along with his new film, the retrospective includes Play (2011), screened at the Portland International Film festival, and Involuntary (2008), winner of the Audience Award at the Stockholm Film Festival and his first film to be submitted by Sweden for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. “In Östlund’s bracing, darkly funny movies, modern life takes shape as a series of simultaneously devastating and absurd crises, no less real for being imagined, and the civilized veneer of Western bourgeois society barely conceals all manner of foibles and prejudices. His deconstructions of ego and privilege are elegant provocations, designed to defy easy identification and, in his words, ‘make the audience take a moral stand on its own.’”—Film Society of Lincoln Center. This touring program is produced by Comeback Company, in partnership with the Swedish Film Institute and Plattform Produktion, with additional support from the Embassy of Sweden in the U.S., and the Scandinavian Heritage Foundation, Portland.