Swedish writer/director Roy Andersson can be an acquired taste. But as those who have seen his Cannes Jury Prize winner Songs from the Second Floor will know, the influences of French maestro Jacques Tati and his attention to comic detail ensure that his episodic satires are as trenchant as they are hilarious. In this slice-of-Stockholm-life comedy drama, Andersson introduces us, through a series of tragicomic vignettes, to a gallery of pitiable grotesques: a depressive wife and her frustrated husband; a young woman with a crush on a musician; and an Arab barber who has had enough of racial abuse. The film exposes the farcical reality of existence and the gloomy inevitability of these mundane lives, flitting between the inconsequential occurrences that blight people who have no idea they're interconnected. With musical interludes and dream sequences laying bare the futility of the characters' aspirations, this brilliant cry of despair is as bleak and savage as the best surrealism is supposed to be.

In the Swedish city of Lethe, people from different walks of life take part in a series of short, deadpan vignettes that rush past. Some are just seconds long, none longer than a couple of minutes. A young woman remembers a fantasy honeymoon with a rock guitarist. A man awakes from a dream about bomber planes. A businessman boasts about success while being robbed by a pickpocket, and so on. The absurdist collection is accompanied by Dixieland jazz and similar music.