Singing from the Second Floor

"Perhaps we have to start admitting the circumstances that make us powerless, and we ourselves have to take responsibility. I believe that the Western lifestyle inhibits the development of people's potential. When you watch this film, you should understand how stupid human behavior is. Disorder eats people away, and the situation is getting worse." ─ Director Roy Anderson Andersson's extremely ambitious and challenging masterpiece. Various issues such as religion, economics, generational relationships, family, and love have been twisted in strange and absurd ways, showing a side that the world often turns a blind eye to. The statue of Jesus swinging with one hand like a monkey on the cross, the mentally degenerated old man celebrating his 100th birthday in front of a room full of ulterior motives, the father who set fire to swindle money, and the son who wrote poems and went crazy and was hospitalized. The unique visual language, between seemingly loosely connected scenes, builds the director's deep view of the contemporary world. On a strange night in an unknown place, strange things happened one after another: undignified company employees were laid off in humiliation; immigrants were attacked by undesirable elements for no apparent reason, and the entire bus station stood idly by; a magician who sawed people alive literally disemboweled the audience members who volunteered to go on stage. In the midst of the chaos, Karl appeared with a face full of smoke. He had just set fire to his own car.