It must be great being Ruben Östlund. He’s just 48 years old and already has two Palme d’Or wins to his name. Now, he’s just been named Jury President for the 76th Cannes Film Festival.
He becomes just the second Swede to be a Jury president at one of the three main film festivals, after Ingmar Bergman (Cannes, 1973).
In case you’re wondering, these are Östlund’s 10 favorite films, per his Sight and Sound list:
* The Tin Drum (Volker Schlöndorff, 1979)
* The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)
* Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2001)
* The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)
* Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967)
* The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1972)
* Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
* Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
* Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)
* Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000)
Other films Östlund has championed over the years: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, “Holy Motors”, “First Cow”, “Annette” and “Swept Away”.
The Cannes announcement comes a day after Östlund teased details about his next film, “The Entertainment System is Down,” which will be set on a long-haul flight whose entertainment system loses power as passengers become “modern human beings that have to deal with boredom and their own thoughts.”
Östlund plans on including a scene where a young boy asks to borrow his older brother’s iPad and is told he has to wait five minutes. “And then I want to challenge the audience,” Ostlund teases. “You stay with the kid in real time. And he’s looking in the catalog, putting it back and the restlessness is coming. So he asks his mother, ‘How much do we have left?’ And she says, ‘Well, now it’s four minutes and 45 seconds, you have to calm down.’”
Östlund added that with this film he wants to cause the most walkouts in Cannes history. “And I think it’s going to be more provocative than any violent, any disturbing content,” he says. “Because to be left alone with your thoughts and challenging the audience to do the same thing, then it’s going to be very interesting.”
His reasoning is simple: Cregger sees himself first and foremost as a writer, and he has little interest in shaping stories around the predetermined “data points” that come with established IP.