Mouth to Mouth

Colour, 35 mm
Sweden, Denmark, 2005, 92 min
IP - International Premiere
Section: Official Selection - Competition

About the film

A dark Scandinavian drama which, beneath a mask of respectability, uncovers the terrible scars often marking the lives of middle-class families. Mats’ problems with alcohol have shaken his family: the oldest of his children, 17-year-old Vera, has run away from home and ended up on the streets. Björn Runge is not, however, merely telling the painful story of a father desperately trying to save both his disintegrating family and a daughter who becomes increasingly dependent on drugs. The raw film images of Mouth to Mouth can also be seen as a pressing question – whether Mats’ efforts are really worth the trouble; whether a secure and relatively safe, but often punishing and intimidating life within the family is truly better than a wild existence among the homeless. A world which is terrifying, but can also mean freedom.

About the director

Björn Runge (b. 1961, Uddevala, Sweden) made his first shorts during the mid-1980s. After completing his studies at the Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm, he began to make a name for himself particularly with the short film Greger Olsson Buys a New Car (Greger Olsson köper en bil, 1990). Over the next decade he made several TV commercials and documentaries and also worked with one of the most original directors of the present, Roy Andersson – as Andersson’s assistant he collaborated on the parable Songs from the Second Floor (Sanger fran andra vaningen, 2000), honoured at Cannes. For his fourth feature film Daybreak (Om jag vänder mig om, 2003) – screened at Karlovy Vary in 2004 – Runge walked away with the Guldbagge Swedish national film prize, and a Silver Bear at the Berlin IFF.