Roy Andersson – characterised by his well-developed style of narration and aesthetics – returns to RIGA IFF. His latest film About Endlessness – the first since A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, with multiple festival’s screenings in 2014 – is as odd and as alluring as the previous. It will be screened as a part of NORDIC HIGHLIGHTS on October 18 and 22.

About Endlessness is a reflection on human life in all its beauty and cruelty, its splendour and banality. We wander, dreamlike, gently guided by a Scheherazade-esque narrator. Inconsequential moments take on the same significance as historical events: a couple floats over a war-torn Cologne; on the way to a birthday party, a father stops to tie his daughter’s shoelaces in the pouring rain; teenage girls dance outside a cafe; a defeated army marches to a prisoner-of-war camp.

The director has developed such a genuinely distinctive and original way of making films that his works qualify as a genre of their own. Simultaneously an ode and a lament, this film presents a kaleidoscope of all that is eternally human, an infinite story of the vulnerability of existence.