Ruben Ostlund - Swedish Director and Writer

Ruben directed films on skiing in the late 1990s, some of them now world-famous. After a documentary work in 2000 he made his award-winning feature debut, The Guitar Mongoloid, in 2004.  Ruben's feature film Involuntary was selected for Cannes 2008 and has since been in major festivals worldwide and Sweden´s nominee for Best Foreign Language Oscar that year.  Involuntary is a series of stories exploring different perspectives on the power of a group over the individual. Ruben’s short film Incident by a Bank won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. His next feature, Play, premiered in Cannes 2011. Incident by a Bank is about an attempted bank robbery and follows the thought process of two confused witnesses, the filmographer and the producer. Play is an astute observation based on real cases of bullying. In central Gothenburg, Sweden, a group of boys, aged 12-14, robbed other children on about 40 occasions between 2006 and 2008, using an elaborate scheme called the "little brother number" or "brother trick", involving advanced role-play and gang rhetoric rather than physical violence.