After Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, a new generation of Scandinavian filmmakers, sometimes with a double culture, imposes itself on the front of the stage, with no less than three directors in the running for the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year.
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The Swede Ruben Östlund, 2017 gold medalist for
The Square
, is back on Saturday with
Without filter
.
His compatriot Tarik Saleh (his film is presented on Friday) and the Dane Ali Abbasi, whose films take place for one in the Egypt of his father and for the other in the Iran of his childhood, are for the first times in competition.
For Claus Christensen, editor-in-chief of the specialized magazine
Ekko
, Nordic cinema, and particularly Swedish and Danish productions, have in common the fact of “
pushing the limits of cinematographic language
”, one of the reasons for their appeal.
“
There is both this mission of entertainment but also sometimes of challenging the public
“, he explains to AFP.
In 2018, Ali Abbasi, archetype of Danish auteur cinema, won the Un certain regard prize at Cannes with
Border (Gräns)
, a fantastic tale about a deformed customs officer.
Read also
Gräns,
by Ali Abbasi, crowned with the Un certain regard prize at Cannes
At the time, the current 40-year-old already had plans to direct
Les nuits de Mashhad
.
Filmed in Jordan, because the conditions of filming in Iran prevented complete creative freedom, her third opus follows a journalist investigating a serial killer in an Iranian holy city.
A work apparently very far from the previous one.
"
You can't catalog it.
When you think you've grabbed it, it changes shape and does something else
,” says producer Jacob Jarek.
Just before the Croisette, he directed episodes of a series for HBO based on a successful video game,
The Last of Us
, proof of the variety of his cinematic interests and the flexibility of his generation.
Perspectives from elsewhere
For Tarik Saleh, born in Stockholm fifty years ago from a Swedish mother and an Egyptian father, multiculturalism is a crucial component of his cinematographic work, as for Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman.
Being a second-generation immigrant gave him the perspective needed to unfold the story of
Boy from Heaven
.
"
You're both inside and outside, and it's sort of the role of the director (...) to see both the similarities and the differences
."
Being an outsider was also essential for the making of the film, for which his Egyptian colleagues would have been "
thrown in prison
", he explains to AFP.
Filmed in Arabic, like his successful thriller
Le Caire confidential
Award-winning at Sundance in 2017, the thriller follows a poor boy who gets a scholarship to the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo and finds himself embroiled in a political drama with religious overtones.
Very eager not to be pigeonholed, Ali Abbasi, from the Iranian upper middle class, believes that the social environment often takes precedence over geographical origin.
“
You arrive with a background, a skin color, a gender.
But those things don't matter as much as some people think, they're more fluid in relation to one thing: your class
,” he
told Politiken
in 2018.
Class reflections also figure prominently in the work of 48-year-old Ruben Östlund, the most established of the three competing Scandinavian directors.
With
Unfiltered
, he offers a parody of the fashion world and the appearance-obsessed super-rich.
Before
The Square
, only two Swedish productions had been awarded the Palme d'Or.
For its part, Denmark received two supreme trophies, notably for
Dancer in the Dark
by Lars von Trier in 2000. Two other Nordic films, the Norwegian
Sick of Myself
by Kristoffer Borgli and the Danish-Icelandic
Godland
by Hlynur Pálmason are present at Cannes , in the Un certain regard section.
