A priest who has lost his faith in God, a man whose legs have been blown off by a mine, another one who is waiting for love, a person who has made the wrong choice - and Hitler. The film is conveyed by a series of tightly composed, picturesque paintings with almost ghostly-looking figures, full of whimsical background details that reward the audience's observant gaze.

Roy Andersson (b. 1943) is a Swedish filmmaker trained at the Swedish Film Institute's Film School in Stockholm at the end of the 1960's. He made his feature-length film debut with A Swedish Love Story in 1970, followed by Giliap in 1975. After this Andersson went over to direct advertising films for over 30 years, many of them award-winning. In the early 2000s, he returned to the feature-length format with his film trilogy including Songs from the Second Floor (2000), You, the living (2007) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014).