You, the Living

You, the Living (2007)

Du levande

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.

Date of release
2007-09-21
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (270)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Drama, Comedy, Music
Director
Roy Andersson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 2. Including: Nordic Council Film Prize; Guldbagge Award for Best Film

You, the Living is a 2007 Swedish black comedy-drama film written and directed by Roy Andersson. The film is an exploration of the "grandeur of existence", centered on the lives of a group of individuals, such as an overweight woman, a disgruntled psychiatrist, a heartbroken groupie, a carpenter, a business consultant, and a school teacher with emotional problems and her rug-selling husband. The basis for the film is an Old Norse proverb, "Man is man's delight", taken from the Poetic Edda poem Hávamál.

Production

From very early on there was trouble with the financing. Andersson had to make regular visits to a pawn shop and several times the team paused production to make commercials, using the proceeds for the film. After being refused funding from the Swedish Film Institute, Roy Andersson accused the consultant of nepotism after he instead gave the money to a film directed by his father-in-law. That film eventually ended up receiving poor reviews.

For the casting, Andersson or an assistant approached people on the street and asked them to participate. Amateurs were preferred to professionals because of the greater selection and the problem of asking renowned actors to take small parts. The exception was Bengt C.W. Carlsson, a professional actor, in the role of the CEO. Actors from Andersson's previous feature films and commercials were also reused.

The film was shot in Roy Andersson's own studio in Östermalm, Stockholm. The filming of the scenes took three years to finish. "It is not the shooting itself that takes time, but the work on creating the environments. We built almost all the sets in the studio, even those that took place outdoors. Most of the time we started from Roy's sketches," said Johan Carlsson, production manager.

The colour scape was designed to have a minimum of contrast, which the director believed would create more intensity. Lighting was arranged to leave no shadows: "I want light where people can't hide in – light without mercy." Andersson is famous for his many takes of each scene, although this time he claimed it went smoother than usual: "max. 40–50 takes and sometimes under ten!"

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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