Jens Assur’s Debut Ravens To Compete At San Sebastian

Jens Assur’s adaptation of Tomas Bannerhed’s August Prize winning novel Ravens (Korparna) has been selected to compete for the Kutxabank New Directors Award and €50,000 at the 65th San Sebastian Film Festival (22-30 September 2017).

A hard-working farmer in 1970s Småland struggles to put food on the table, and his young son Klas can only watch as despair consumes his father. But while Klas dreams of migrating birds – of escape – his father expects him to take on the farm and continue the legacy.

Klas can’t accept the life his father has chosen for him and takes solace in nature, with the cuckoos, curlews and lapwings, far from the tormented world of Raven Fen. And as his father, like his father before him, falls deeper into madness, Klas begins to wonder if he himself might be insane.

The August Prize jury said of Tomas Bannerhed’s debut: “It is a novel about nature in the eye of the beholder. And through the clear gaze of young Klas we see it reborn in all its inexorable grandeur: fatal and lush, strange and magical. Tomas Bannerhed ploughs new furrows in wordsmithery.”

Ravens is released in Sweden on 15th September 2017.