Stockholm Fest Honors Alexander Skarsgård, Benny Safdie

Alexander Skarsgård and Benny Safdie will be honored at this year’s Stockholm Film Festival, with the Swedish actor receiving Stockholm’s Achievement Award, and the New York director getting the festival’s Visionary Award.

Skarsgård’s latest Pillion, in which he stars as a domineering biker who begins a turbulent relationship with the submissive Colin, played by Harry Melling, will screen at Stockholm, as will Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, his first solo feature as a director. The film, which premiered in Venice, winning best director honors for Safdie, stars Dwayne Johnson as real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr, with Emily Blunt as his partner Dawn Staples. The Smashing Machine recently opened to a disappointing $6 million in its North America bow, the lowest box office debut in Johnson’s career.

Stockholm unveiled the program for its 36th edition, running November 5–16, which will include a best-of-the-2025 festival season, including such Oscar contenders as Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Mascha Schillinski’s The Sound of Falling, and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl.

The festival opens with Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, the final installment in his Cairo trilogy starring Fares Fares, and closes with Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love, another hot awards contender, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. Other highlights include Ronan Day-Lewis’s directorial debut Anemone, featuring dad Daniel Day-Lewis in his first screen role in years, and Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, about Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, starring Ethan Hawke, which premiered in Berlin.

This year’s Spotlight section, “Be Kind Rewind,” explores nostalgia and the persistence of memory through films such as Videoheaven, Ross McElwee’s Remake, and Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujars Day, set in 1970s New York. The festival also honors the late David Lynch, who inaugurated Stockholm’s first edition in 1990, with screenings of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive and a conversation with Blue Velvet star Isabella Rossellini.

Music figures prominently throughout the program, with new documentaries like It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley and the Swedish feature Egghead Republic, as well as Jennifer Lopez’s reinterpretation of Kiss of the Spider Woman and the Catalan drama Forastera, featuring a score by Anna von Hausswolff and Filip Leyman.

Germany is this year’s Focus Country in Stockholm, represented by Schillinski’s Sound of Falling and Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No.3 alongside new works by Lauro Cress and Joscha Bongard.

The documentary lineup features new films from Werner Herzog, Laura Poitras, and Raoul Peck, while the Stockholm Series program will showcase new television projects, including Isabella Eklöf’s The Death of Bunny Munroe and Justin Kurzel’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.