FACED with one of the strongest competitions for some time, in which half a dozen films could legitimately lay claim to the Golden Lion prize, Alexandre Desplat and his international jury threw the balls into the air and came up with one that few considered among the best — Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. 

This film is the final part of a loosely connected trilogy about “what it is to be human” which began with Songs from the Second Floor and continued in You, the Living.

It’s a comic drama which tells the story of two distinctly oddball travelling salesmen as they interact with other characters in a kaleidoscopic journey through the humour and tragedy hidden within every human. A rare pleasure and Swedish director Andersson does an extraordinary job.