The high-profile Swedish director behind kinoaktuelle Sadness trianglewants nothing less than to guide the movie audience, says a press release from Gothenburg Film Festival (GIF).
During a special screening of his latest film at the festival, he will break the “fourth wall” and challenge the audience to adopt a more mindful attitude towards his role.
This is undoubtedly another creative move to create buzz around the festival that has become Ostlund Honorary President for. But Ostlund’s commitment to the collective cinema experiment is not just a gimmick. That’s something he’s long had strong opinions about, not least in conversations we’ve had with him here at rushprint.no.
Compared to France and the United States, for example, Sweden has a passive audience culture. He believes that here we are hiding in the rows of seats and taking less responsibility for performance.
“If cinematic culture is to flourish and reach its full potential, audiences must understand its role.”
In order to conduct performances at the festival, Ostlund wants to get to know the audience better. So you have to answer a few questions if you want to buy a ticket (The script continues after the event trailer).
This is a cinema! It will be held at Drakken Cinemas on Saturday, January 28th. On the same day, the festival will organize a series of seminars on film as a cultural expression and social space. The future of cinema culture is also one of the topics that will be discussed during the festival’s annual symposium on cinema policy on January 27.
Perhaps Ostlund will repeat some of his fads, which he aired for Rushprint In our interview with him from this summer. There, among other things, he made critical statements about the European subsidy system.
“With this support system, there is a problem that as directors and producers we are financially secure once we receive the money, which means we don’t always do our best to reach the audience. If you look at American films, which don’t have a government support system, they have to reach an audience, Or lose their jobs, all those who work there. There are two very different ways of making movies.”
Ostlund believes that in the Scandinavian film we should take the best from the American and European approach. He himself wants to communicate widely.
“When I was traveling between the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals at one point, sometime after I made the movie PlayIt was interesting to sit and look at all the screens inside the plane: what is our film industry watching? Since we don’t watch our own movies, we watch Adam Sandler, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think that – and it’s not really about Adam Sandler – it’s weird if that’s the case that we don’t want to watch our own movies when we sit on that plane. So it became my idea, that I want to make movies that I’ll choose to watch even when I’m sitting on a plane flipping through movies.”
Read the full interview here.
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