Co-winner of the Jury prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival (sharing the prize with Blackboards, also showing at MIFF), Songs From the Second Floor is an alarmingly funny and bold film.

'Songs From the Second Floor, directed by Sweden's Roy Andersson, is the most provocative of this year's Cannes films, and also the funniest. The film is audacious, offensive, original and surrealistic. It is a series of vignettes in a lonely city gripped by psychic meltdown. Gridlock stops all of the city's traffic. A magician makes a horrible mistake while sawing a man in half. In a strange ceremony, witnessed by clerics and dignitaries, a blindfolded little girl is made to walk the plank and fall into a deep pit full of broken stones. A bankrupt businessman empties a truckload of crucifixes at the town dump and moans that he invested in a loser. Some of the scenes are sacrilegious. Some are just plain funny. I scribbled names into my notes: Beckett, Bunuel, Tati, Kafka - but Andersson has created his own world." — Roger Ebert