Program Note
Experiencing Roy Andersson’s film is like completing an enormous jigsaw puzzle of an abstract painting. Instead of certain locations, people or objects, the puzzle is completed by putting together shapes or colors that stir up certain feelings, and then a whole universe is completed. The pieces and the completed puzzle are not a relationship between the part and the whole, but a lasting relationship that draws and embraces each other. This is like fiction and existence, laughter and sadness, reality and fantasy.
About Endlessness, which won the award for Best Director at the 2019 Venice International Film Festival, is a comedy filled with Andersson’s signatures, including comic characters with expressionless faces shown on a deep-focused screen in a dry grey tone, the sound of the surroundings with minimum information from the narration sound principle, and the sequence of episodes that go back and forth in location and time. Just like ‘Living Trilogy’, it is needless to say that the most important topic in this bizarre comic world is human existence. (Jin PARK)