EXCLUSIVE: Swedish filmmaker’s tech satire will be presented as a work-in-progress in Goteborg
Picture Tree International (PTI) has boarded international sales for Swedish filmmaker Anton Källrot’s tech satire Push The Button, which will be presented as a work-in-progress at the Goteborg Film Festival’s Nordic Film Market later this month.
Written and directed by Källrot and produced by Sweden’s ÖGAT Film, Push The Button is in post-production. After its Goteborg presentation, PTI will also introduce the film with additional materials during Berlin’s European Film Market.
Push The Button follows a troubled journalist and a small band of outsiders as they leave the city behind and journey into the Swedish countryside, tracing the myth of a fallen tech visionary who claims he can shut down the internet at the push of a button.
It is billed as a darkly comic and poetic road movie about one of the defining anxieties of contemporary life: humans’ dependence on technology and the creeping fear the systems we built to serve us may quietly be calculating a future that doesn’t include us.
“The film is a look at humanity,” said Källrot. “Our small lives, both comic and tragic, how intelligent and foolish we can be at the same time. Buried in a time capsule, the film could be seen as a nostalgic elegy for the early 2020s, when human inventiveness threatened our own existence. Push the Button! asks, when standing at the edge of the abyss, whether we have the ability to choose a different direction than the one we always take – forward?”
The film’s Nordic and international cast includes Noah Taylor, Kati Outinen, Eero Milonoff, Ylva Olaison, Emil Brulin and Jonathan Silén.
It will be released in Sweden by TriArt Film. Push The Button is produced by Ylva Olaison and Madeleine Ekman of ÖGAT Film, with co-production support from Film i Väst and SVT.
Financing partners include Swedish Film Institute, Film i Väst, SVT, Nordisk Film & TV Fund, YLE, Good Partner Media Group, TINT, Enric Production, IStudios and Kaiho Republic.
Andreas Rothbauer, founder and co-managing director of Picture Tree International, said: “Blending satire, absurdist humour and existential reflection, Push The Button approaches its subject with warmth, irony and cinematic ambition. Rather than offering a dystopian warning, the film presents a human-scale, emotionally intelligent exploration of connection, control and rebellion in the age of algorithms – positioning it as a distinctive audience film with strong arthouse crossover potential and international resonance.”
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