Five international distributors who released Andersson’s Golden Lion winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence have snapped rights to his latest opus about human existence: Neue Visionen for Germany, Ama Films for Greece, Demiurg for Ex-Yugoslavia and Filmarti for Turkey, with Hungary’s Vertigo Media as new buyer.

At press time, several offers were on the table and Bober was waiting for About Endlessness’s world premiere to finalise further sales.

Bober who has worked with the Swedish master since 1996 and serves as German-co-producer and sales agent on About Endlessness, talks about Andersson’s unique vision, the increased value of his films on the global market and overall state of arthouse market.

You’ve worked on Roy Andersson’s ‘Living’ trilogy Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and now About Endlessness. What makes his films so unique?
Philippe Bober: Roy’s working methods are particular. He creates vignettes and stand-alone scenes which illustrate the film’s underlying idea. He creates storyboards that are often inspired by photos or paintings. The vignettes in the same pale colour palette, are meticulously staged, inspired by paintings and shot with a fixed camera and wide angles, stitched together with a nod to a poem or citation. The creation of a compelling film, despite the absence of a linear narrative and the absence of a script is unique. I don’t see anything comparable in the history of cinema.

There is also the fact that his films are shot almost entirely in a studio. Most actors are non-professional and outfitted in drab clothing with faces painted shades of white to make their faces more generic and less unique, to represent humans as a whole. Most of his films are about the human condition and yet his characters are going through often banal and tragic comedic situations with "realist surrealism". Roy explores existential themes via common subjects like people drinking alone in bars, failed love affairs and the losing side of history. His characters often utter banal sentences, for instance “I'm happy to hear that you're doing fine.”

A third point is perfectionism. Roy’s studio shooting with sets that might take months to build, enables him to recreate his vision to perfection - hard to achieve outdoors. And in some cases, if the studio shoot does not result in perfection, the set will be rebuilt and the shot reshot.

What has been the impact of the Golden Lion on the results of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch?
PB: In general, the film stands on its own, even without the award and the influence was positive but marginal. A handful of distributors who had already turned down the film before the award came back to discuss A Pigeon.. a second time after the Golden Lion award. As a result, we probably sold one or two additional territories because of the Venice award.

It probably also encouraged distributors who bought the film to invest more in the P&A budget which had an impact on the admission numbers, and on media attention, especially the local press and news agencies.

Which of the three films in the ‘Living’ trilogy has been most successful worldwide?
PB: In all key territories, A Pigeon sold more tickets than the previous films. For instance, Torsten Frehse of Neue Visionen in Germany considers that maybe 10% of the admissions came from the Golden Lion in Venice, but the film sold double as many tickets as You, the Living (120,000 instead of 60,000), similarly to the majority of large territories, including the US (Magnolia, 26,441), Italy (Lucky Red, 77,131), Japan (Bitters, 24,514), Spain (Golem, 18,181) and France (Les films du Losange, 40,349).

Overall, each of Roy’s last three films have consistently increased in popularity. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch achieved 607,680 admissions from 38 territories, almost twice the results of You, The Living (335,653 admissions from 35 territories), which itself performed better than Songs from the Second Floor (265,338 admissions from 23 territories).

How has the financing of Roy Andersson’s films evolved?
PB: The financiers of About Endlessness have been extremely faithful partners to Roy’s work. The Swedish Film Institute, SVT, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Coproduction Office (as a sales company), Arte France, Eurimages, Filmstiftung NRW, ZDF/Arte, and my French and German production companies, Essential Films, were all part of Roy’s previous three films. More recently Norway (Fiktion 4 ½ with the Norwegian Film Institute) and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg have joined as co-financiers. The financing of Roy’s films has had a remarkable stability over the last two decades, with all films budgets being between €4.5 -€4.8 million.

How do you work on the marketing campaign and creation of marketing materials with Roy Andersson?
PB: We work collaboratively with Roy Andersson Film Production to identify one key image to drive the word-of-mouth and the marketing. We spend a lot of time on the press book in collaboration with Roy. The press book we made for Roy’s films so far were later used by our distributors for local distribution. For A Pigeon,  we made a trailer which was used worldwide by our distributors and which we believe, played a part in the success of the film.

How is the state of the international arthouse market these days?
PB: We cannot see from our statistics, that the arthouse sector is declining; for us it is rather the opposite.

For instance, our film Little Joe by Jessica Hausner which won best actress in Cannes this year, has already sold in over 30 territories, including the US (Magnolia). China can be an area of growth for the arthouse market and we have focused recently on developing our relationship with Chinese players.

If we look at films such as the 2018 Cannes Jury Prize winner Capernaum, and 2018 Palme d’or Shoplifters, both gathered more admissions in China than in France which until now was the world’s biggest foreign language arthouse market. Little Joe is going to be distributed in China through the National Alliance of Arthouse Cinemas and with probably a larger number of theatres than in the combined rest of the world. We are now very curious to see the results.