Roy Andersson

Songs from the Second Floor; A Swedish Love Story

Sweden

Voted in the directors’ poll

Voted for

Amarcord	1972	Federico Fellini
Andrei Rublev	1966	Andrei Tarkovsky
Ashes and Diamonds	1958	Andrzej Wajda
Barry Lyndon	1975	Stanley Kubrick
Battle of Algiers, The	1966	Gillo Pontecorvo
Bicycle Thieves, The	1948	Vittorio de Sica
Hiroshima Mon Amour	1959	Alain Resnais
Intolerance	1916	D.W. Griffith
Rashomon	1950	Akira Kurosawa
Viridiana	1961	Luis Buñuel

Comments

This is my list of films that I consider the best in film history. I hesitated a little about what word I should use: the best films or the most important films. I decided to call them the best films. Only the first three films are placed in order of preference. The others are a mixture without preference.

My absolute favourite is Bicycle Thieves, the most humanistic and political film in history. Viridiana is the most intelligent and Hiroshima mon amour is the most poetic.

All the ten films are excellent and fascinating artistic expressions about what I would call mankind’s both raw and delightful existence. These movies make us wiser.