Ruben Östlund

Born in 1974 in Styrsö, in the Municipality of Gothenburg, Sweden, Ruben Östlund took his first steps as a director when he was a seasonal worker at a ski resort in the Alps and filmed some friends on the slopes. Thanks to these videos, he obtained a job in a local production company and was admitted to Gothenburg’s HFF (now part of HDK-Valand). During his years at university, he laid the foundations of his career: he met important personalities such as producer Kalle Boman and director Roy Anderson. He accompanied the latter to the premiere of his film Songs From the Second Floor at Cannes in 1999. Östlund fell in love with the French film festival, to which he will take part in the following years, winning several awards. He co-founded the production company Plattform Produktion with Erik Hemmendorff, whom he met at university. During his formative years, he realized that the secret for becoming a successful director is pointing the camera to what he deeply loves and is interested in. For this reason, he dedicated several films to skiing, like Force Majeure (2014), in which he demonstrated his ability in long sequence shots which will become his trademark, along with his satirical and irreverent humour.

Ruben Östlund graduated in 2001 and made his debut with his first feature film, The Guitar Mongoloid, in 2004, which was honored with the FIPRESCI Award at the Moscow Film Festival. The short film Incident By a Bank won Best Short Film at the 60th Berlin Film Festival and at the Tampere Film Festival in 2011. Starting from his second film, Involuntary (2008), his works have always premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Play (2011) won the Nordic Film Prize, the most important cinema award of Scandinavia. Force Majeure (2014) won the Jury Prize of the section Un Certain Regard at Cannes and was also nominated at the Academy Awards for Best International Film and for the Golden Globe Awards. In 2016 he was a Member of the Jury of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. The Square (2017) won the Palme d’Or and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar. In 2020, Östlund received the Golden Medal from the King of Sweden for his work as film director. In 2022, thanks to the comedy film Triangle of Sadness, he won another Palme d’Or, along with an award as Best Director at Guldbaggens Gala. The very next day, the film was nominated for the Golden Globe Awards and for the Oscars as Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. In 2023, he was the President of the Jury  at  Cannes.