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Directed by Gabriela Pichler (Sweden, 2012). Set in present day southern Sweden, Eat Sleep Die centers on the story of 20-year old Muslim Swedish/Balkan factory worker Raša (Nermina Lukač), who lives with her sickly father (Milan Dragišić) in a small town. When the local factory reduces its staff, she loses her job and must attempt to wade through the Swedish unemployment system.
The film follows her struggle to simultaneously find a new job and care for her father. Shuttling between meetings at the employment office and with her job coach, Raša vacillates between frustration and a lust for revenge.
With no high school diploma and no job, she finds herself on collision course with Swedish society and its comical world of bureaucracy and contradicting values and expectations. All she wants is that life should be something more than just eat, sleep, die.
Insightful and edgy, Eat Sleep Die is an art-house drama that explores themes of working class values, unemployment, immigration, and paternal love.
100 min. | In Swedish, Montenegrin, and Serbian with English subtitles.
Special thanks to the Danish Film Institute, the Icelandic Film Centre, Magnolia Pictures, and the Swedish Film Institute.
About the director
Gabriela Pichler (b. 1980) was born into a working class family in a segregated suburb of Stockholm. Her Bosnian and Austrian-born parents later moved the family to the countryside. Pichler left her stable job at a cookie factory to attend the School of Film Directing in Gothenburg. Pichler’s graduation project, the short film Scratches/Skrapsår (2009), won the Guldbagge Award for Best Short Film (2010) and has received several international awards, including Best Film at the Fresh Film Festival in Karlovy Vary, the Czech Republic.
Pichler’s films focus on social class and cultural identity. Her work searches for authenticity and the unexpected in everyday life, and often incorporates amateurs as actors.Chosen this year among Variety’s “10 European Directors to Watch,” her filmmaking style has been compared to the social realism of the Dardenne brothers and to Lukas Moodysson’s early works.
Made with the desire to show a different side of Sweden, Eat Sleep Die is Pichler’s debut feature film. It has received several awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at Angers’ Premiers Plans Film Festival in France, the Audience Award at Venice Film Festival, and a Greta Award from the Swedish Film Critics Association. In 2012 it won Best Film at the Guldbagge Awards; Gabriela Pichler was awarded two awards – Best Director and Best Screenplay and Nermina Lukač won Best Actress. Eat Sleep Die was also nominated for the 2013 Nordic Council Film Prize.
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Photo by Jonathan B. Ragle
WED – 1-8-2014 – 7:00 PM
$10 ($7 ASF Members)