The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
The Durban International Film Festival announced the winners of its audience awards for 2014. The winning feature is The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared from Swedish director Felix Herngren, and the DIFF 2014 audience award for best documentary goes to 1994: The Bloody Miracle, directed by Meg Rickards and Bert Haisma. Based on the internationally best-selling novel by Jonas Jonasson, the energetically oddball black comedy, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared from Swedish director Felix Herngren, begins with irrepressible pensioner and dynamite expert Allan Karlsson’s escape from a retirement home. His subsequent cross-county shenanigans are interspersed with flashbacks to a past studded with extraordinary events and famous historical figures. Highly entertaining, its pastiche of history refracted through the life of an eccentric is reminiscent of a darker take on Forrest Gump. The film received nearly unanimous votes of excellent from the DIFF audience.