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Ruben Östlund may not be competing at Cannes this year — the two-time Palme d’Or winner (The Square, Triangle of Sadness) took his new, still-unfinished film, The Entertainment System Is Down out of contention for the 2026 fest — but he still found time for a quick trip to the Croisette.
The Swedish filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter he is still deep in post-production for the film, and does not expect it be done before the end of the year. Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Brühl, and Keanu Reeves are among the starry cast in Östlund’s new satire, set on a long-haul flight between England and Australia where the entertainment system fails and passengers are forced to face the existential horror of boredom.
Östlund said he continues to tweak the movie, including adding a new sequence with Succession star Nicholas Braun.
“I’m going to Amsterdam. We’re going to shoot a little additional scene that came up during the editing,” he said. “I got an idea during the editing that I think is really great so we’re going to put that in.”
Östlund began principal photography on The Entertainment System is Down in late January 2024, shooting a remarkable 75 days on a single studio set built around a real Boeing 747 acquired and outfitted specifically for the film.
The sheer volume of footage accumulated during that extended shoot has made for a lengthy editing process. “I could just become completely mad and never stop editing the film,” Östlund quipped, before quickly reassuring his fans that the film would not be too long in coming. “I’m actually starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The real reason for Östlund’s visit to the Croisette, however, was not his own film but a new venture he hopes will change the way people discover cinema. Together with fellow Swedish filmmakers Felix Herngren, the director of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, and Johan Kindblom, writer and creator of the acclaimed Swedish series Cleo, Östlund has launched MyList — a film recommendation platform built on the simple but increasingly radical premise: That human taste beats algorithmic curation.
The site, which has just launched in Sweden , invites filmmakers, actors, writers, musicians, politicians and ordinary film lovers alike to compile personal lists of recommended films, organized by theme or category, with context and personal reflections.
Östlund’s has corralled his famous friends and collaborators to do lists. Dunst, Brühl and Reeves have all posted their top 5 MyList selections, as has Polish auteur Pawel Pawlikowski, currently in Cannes competition with his new film Fatherland, and Palme d’Or and Oscar winner Sean Baker (Anora). Baker’s list is not your typical top 5, but a selection of the films he believes best capture the experience of heroin addiction with a candid personal account of his own struggles with the drug.
The MyList founders say it was frustration with the dominant model of film discovery — whether driven by streaming algorithms or aggregated ratings scores — that drove them to launch their alternative site.
“Today you almost rate everything — you rate the beach, you rate streets, the restaurants, you rate your kids, your wife. It’s not a good way of looking at life,” said Herngren. “With this site, a recommendation becomes meaningful, personal. It becomes more than just: was it a four or a five or a three?”
Östlund is also drawn to the platform’s ability to bridge the gap between film industry insiders and the broader public. “It’s interesting when you can mix professionals from the industry — actors, film critics — next to people working with something completely different,” he said, noting that the site’s ambition extends well beyond cinema enthusiasts. “MyList has a little approach of trying to reach the ones who maybe haven’t even considered themselves cinephiles.”
On the practical side, MyList will link each recommended title directly to available streaming options in the user’s region — solving, as Herngren put it, the familiar frustration of receiving a recommendation and then having no idea where to actually watch it. The team also has plans to eventually incorporate links to theatrical screenings, though that functionality is not yet live.
The site is ad-supported and free to users, with a small referral fee paid by participating streaming services when users click through to their platforms — Netflix, notably, has not yet signed on. For now, MyList is available only in Sweden, but the founders say an English-language version of the site is imminent, with a broader European and ultimately global rollout to follow.
“The internet has no borders,” said Kindblom. “It will travel.”