Lukas Moodysson
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Karl Frederik Lukas Moodysson (Swedish IPA: ['lʉ:kas 'mɔd:ʏsɔn]) (born January 17, 1969) is a Swedish film writer and director. He has three children with his wife Coco.
Born in Malmö, Sweden, Moodysson grew up as an outcast, expressing himself through poetry. By the time he was 23 he had written five poetry collections and a novel published by Wahlström & Widstrand. He decided to move to film to produce works that were less introverted and could be enjoyed by a wider audience than poetry. After studying at what was then Sweden's only film school, the Dramatiska Institutet, he directed three short films before moving to features.
His directorial breakthrough came with Fucking Åmål (retitled Show Me Love in some 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, outgrossing Titanic that year.
His next film, 2000's Together (Tillsammans), followed the antics of life in a commune in suburban Stockholm in the 1970's. 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, named to many American critics' ten best lists for 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.
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.
Moodysson is an outspoken left wing socialist, feminist, and vegetarian and at the same time a profoundly spiritual Christian. All of these traits that have become more and more pronounced in his works.
[edit] Filmography
- Det var en mörk och stormig natt (1995)
- En uppgörelse i den undre världen (1996)
- Talk (Bara prata lite) (1997)
- Fucking Åmål (aka Show Me Love) (1998)
- Together (Tillsammans) (2000)
- The New Country (Det nya landet) (2000)
- Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever) (2002)
- Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced (Terrorister - en film om dom dömda) (2003)
- A Hole in My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta) (2004)
- Container (2006)
