Lukas Moodysson - Filmmaking

Filmmaking

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.

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, included in many American critics' top ten lists 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. At the time of the film's release, critic Dave Kehr of The New York Times declared Moodysson to be "Sweden's most praised filmmaker since Ingmar Bergman".

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.

All of Moodysson's feature films have been produced, or co-produced, by Memfis Film, a small Swedish production company based in Stockholm. Memfis' CEO and producer Lars Jönsson seeks to establish long-term working relationships with directors, and support even less commercially oriented projects, such as Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart and Container.