Karl Frederik Lukas
Moodysson ( ) (born 17 January 1969) is a Swedish
film writer and director. He has three children with
his wife
Coco.
Born in
Lund
, Moodysson grew up in Åkarp
, Skåne
County
as an outcast, expressing himself through
poetry. By the time he was 23 he had written five
poetry collections and a
novel
published by
Wahlström
& Widstrand. He decided to move to film to produce works
that were less introverted and could be enjoyed by a wider audience
than poetry. After studying at what was then Sweden's only film
school, the
Dramatiska
Institutet, he directed three
short
films before moving to features.
His directorial breakthrough came with
Fucking Åmål
(retitled
Show Me Love
in
English-speaking countries.) A
classical love story, filmed in a highly naturalistic, almost
documentary style, it is set in the small and boring Swedish town
of Åmål, and follows two young girls who awkwardly fall in love.
The film was a huge success with both the Swedish public and the
critics. It won four
Guldbagge
Awards, including best film, best actress (shared by the two
girls
Rebecka Liljeberg and
Alexandra Dahlström), best
direction and best script. It was a colossal hit in Sweden,
outgrossing
Titanic
that year.
His next film, 2000's
Together (Tillsammans), followed
the antics of life in a commune in suburban Stockholm in the 1970s.
The film achieved a sense of the era through extensive use of
period Swedish
progg and pop songs, including
ABBA's hit "S.O.S."
Moodysson followed up these two sunny, cheerfully optimistic films
with the brutal
Lilya 4-ever in 2002,
named by many American critics' ten best lists for the following
year.
The
mainly Russian language film
follows a young girl living in an unspecified country in the former
Soviet
Union
(filmed in Estonia) as she is abandoned by her
mother, drops out of school, is forced into prostitution and then
is kidnapped into sex slavery. Moodysson has said he could
not have made the film without his strong Christian beliefs, and
the frequent religious fantasies that Lilja has are the only tender
spots in the bleak world Moodysson presents.
His 2004 film, the controversial
A Hole in My Heart, is more an
experimental film than a traditional narrative, and he has said it
is intentionally designed to be off-putting to the audience. It
intersperses frequent screeching noises, close-ups of female
genital surgery, and other jarring elements into a vague plot about
two pornographers shooting their latest video in a filthy
apartment, with an attention-craving porn starlet, while the
webbed-handed son of one of the men stays holed up in his bedroom.
It received a special certificate for shocking images in Sweden,
and received terrible reviews from the vast majority of
critics.
He followed this with another even more experimental film, 2006's
Container, featuring
narration by actress
Jena Malone. The
only audible sound in the movie is a
stream of
consciousness narrative, which is only loosely related to the
visual content.
His latest project,
Mammoth was released January 23,
2009. Unlike his previous two efforts, it is a narrative film and
also his first English-language piece, about a successful New York
couple, their daughter and her Filipino nanny.
Moodysson is an outspoken left wing
socialist,
feminist, and
vegetarian and at the same time a
profoundly spiritual
Christian. All of
these traits have become more and more pronounced in his
works.
Filmography
Awards
- Teddy Award for Best Feature
Film award Fucking Åmål, 1999
- Gijón International Film Festival:
Best Director award Together, 2000. Best
Script award Together, 2000. Best Actor
award Michael Nyquist, Together, 2000. Young Jury Prize for
Best Feature Film Together, 2000.
- Gijón International Film Festival:
Best Feature Film award Lilya 4-Ever, 2002.
Best Actress award Oksana Akinshina, Lilya 4-Ever,
2002. Young Jury Prize for Best Feature Film Lilya
4-Ever, 2002.
External links
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