Ottawa audiences love the work of Swedish absurdist master filmmaker, Roy Andersson. Since the Canadian Film Institute presented his Songs From The Second Floor (2000) at the European Union Film Festival in 2002, local audiences have enthusiastically embraced his subsequent films, You, The Living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence (2014). And what's not to love? Andersson’s wry, world-weary, often utterly hilarious take on the absurdity of our times is as refreshing as it is cinematically daring.
In About Endlessness, he again constructs interwoven narratives of various characters as a series of static, poetic vignettes. Through his brilliantly constructed images drift lonely figures searching for meaning: a pastor plunged into a crisis of faith, a psychiatrist closing his office to those in need in order to catch a train, a wan bureaucrat recalling an old childhood friend he thinks he has seen wandering the streets, the strange meaning of a woman's broken shoe, a couple floating Chagall-like over a city in ruins. Philosophically punctuating the vignettes is an unseen narrator offering wistful observations of the state of human experience. Inimitable. Unforgettable. Andersson.
- Tom McSorley