Following a premiere at the Venice Film Festival — where it picked up the festival’s top honors — A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence will finally be released in U.S. theaters next month. Marking the long-awaited return for Swedish director Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living) the film caps off his trilogy of humorous, meticulously crafted, and affecting vignettes.
One of our top films to see this summer, we said in our review from Venice last year, “Death and despair are explicitly present throughout the film, whether it’s following the salesmen from one store to the next, or moving from a flashback to a dream. (An impromptu song-and-dance number at Limping Lotte’s bar, with its sudden glimpse into 1943, is among the best Andersson sequences ever.) It’s a gloomy feeling, not devoid of a certain disorientation — like “a horrible thing happened, and I was part of it” — but there’s immense pleasure in it all.”
Check out the U.S. trailer below for the film presented by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Darren Aronofsky:
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence opens on June 3rd.