About Endlessness

Ends Thursday, June 24

(Sweden, Germany, Norway, France / 2019 / Directed by Roy Andersson)

Rumored to be the final film from Swedish director Roy Andersson (You, The Living; A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence; Songs from the Second Floor), About Endlessness is a reflection on human life in all of its beauty, cruelty, splendor and banality. Leaving an oeuvre of films that capture a grand sense of human existence, “few living directors beget work that carries so clear and so immediate a signature” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.

The film guides its viewers on a dreamlike trajectory, guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Along the way, inconsequential moments take on the same significance as historical events: a couple floats over a war-torn Cologne; on the way to a birthday party, a father stops to tie his daughter’s shoelaces in the pouring rain; teenage girls dance outside a cafe; a defeated army marches to a prisoner-of-war camp. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, About Endlessness presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.

1 hr 18 mins.
In Swedish with subtitles.