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The OIFF will award the Swedish director Roy Andersson a Lifetime Achievement Golden Duke and will show his mini-retrospective at the 11th edition of the festival

A Q&A with the director will be held online for the OIFF audience

 
The Swedish master Roy Andersson will receive the honorary Golden Duke Award for his exceptional contribution to film art. Andersson, a prizewinner of Cannes, Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, will be distinguished in the frame of the 11th Odesa International Film Festival, which will be held online 25 September - 3 October 2020.

In addition, the festival will feature a mini-retrospective of Roy Andersson's filmography. It includes three films: the director's debut Swedish Love Story, the award-winning Songs from the Second Floor and Roy Andersson's new work About Endlessness. A Q&A with the director will be held online.

"Roy Andersson is one of the masters of Swedish cinema. For more than 50 years, he has built a filmography that reflects his perfectionism: 6 films shot in half a century, that ranges Andersson in the category of the filmmakers that put a lot of time, meticulosity, and virtuosity in the elaboration of their cinema, just like Stanley Kubrick (who shot 13 films during his all career). His style is immediately recognizable: still shots, extremely well-composed like paintings, with a high dose of dark humor and strangeness, but also a sense of poetry and burlesque, that tell so much about both the absurdity and the beauty of the world we live in", the OIFF programme director Anthelme Vidaud noted.

Roy Andersson was born in Gothenburg in 1943. After having graduated from the Swedish Film Institute’s Film School in Stockholm in 1969, he directed his first film in 1970, “A Swedish Love Story”, which was awarded four prizes at the Berlin Film Festival. His second picture, “Giliap” in 1975, was selected in Cannes Directors' Fortnight. After that Roy Andersson worked on advertising films, for which he received numerous awards, including eight Cannes Golden Lions. In 1989, Roy Andersson's unfinished AIDS film “Something Happened” was released. He was the co-editor of the anthology “Successful Freezing of Mr. Moro” in 1992. He was also the contributing editor of the exhibition “Sweden and the Holocaust”.

“Songs from the Second Floor Roy” marked his come-back to film in 2000. This picture received the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, “You, the Living”, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. This is the second part of the trilogy, which started with “Songs from the Second Floor”. The final part of the trilogy, “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence”, premiered at the 71st Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Golden Lion. Roy Andersson became the first and only Swedish director to receive this award. In 2019, Andersson’s latest film “About Endlessness” was also awarded at Venice Film Festival, receiving the Silver Lion for Best Director.

The 11th Odesa International Film Festival will take place online from 25 September to 3 October 2020.