Ruben Östlund might be the most prominent European filmmaker of his generation but his movies weren’t always caustic comedies or unsettling takedowns of masculinity, capitalism, or art-world pretensions. That came later. The Swede started out making ski films he’d first loved as a teenage ski bum.
They had names like Free Radicals – “arguably the most celebrated Swedish ski film ever” – and, yes, Free Radicals 2. Artistically, it was all uphill from there – film school, student shorts and documentaries, including one where he got his parents to explain their divorce, before his early features. His two most recent films both won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. His latest, Triangle of Sadness, is among this year’s 10 Best Picture Oscar contenders, while Östlund is also up for best director and best original screenplay.
Yes, his international breakthrough, 2014’s involved a ski resort and an avalanche, but is set) or an art gallery black-tie dinner (in 2017’s ) where a primate-channelling performance artist provided a strange .
