Christian is a respected curator at a contemporary art museum in Stockholm who finds himself in professional and personal crisis as he prepares for an installation. His exhibition, titled The Square, is intended to be a ‘sanctuary of trust and caring’ that offers a space to examine the meaning of altruism and to question our moral responsibilities. When Christian’s phone and wallet are stolen, he makes clumsy attempts at retribution and struggles to live up to his utopian ideals. Distracted by his personal turmoil, he accidentally approves a disastrous public relations campaign for the museum that causes widespread outrage. The Square satirizes the bourgeois art world with devastating accuracy, but it also broadly skewers pretensions to intellectualism, political correctness, and morality.

Ruben Östlund (b. 1974, Sweden) is an avid skier. He began his filmmaking career shooting ski stunts, a practice that sparked his interest in constructing long sequence shots. Östlund studied at the University of Gothenburg, where he met his long-time collaborator Erik Hemmendorff and founded the production company Plattform Produktion. He is best known for his humorous interpretation of human social behaviour through films such as Triangle of Sadness and Force Majeure. In 2017, his fifth feature film The Square won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.