Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Songs from the Second Floor is composed of forty-five precisely staged vignettes that present a series of personal tragedies and city-wide crises in the no man’s land of a perpetually overcast, postindustrialized Europe. An outrageous sense of global doom builds as a furniture shop owner burns down his store to collect the insurance money, a traffic jam brings a city to paralysis, a nightclub magician’s trick of sawing a man in half goes dreadfully wrong, and an immigrant is assaulted in full view of a crowd awaiting a bus. Director Roy Andersson, once dubbed “the unknown genius of contemporary cinema,” brings his precise mise-en-scène and surrealist visuals to bear on the underlying absurdity of modern existence with a humor that has been compared to that of Beckett, Kafka, and Keaton. A mordant black comedy turned nightmare, Songs from the Second Floor is a searing meditation on millennial decadence.