For the sixteenth year in a row, the Stockholm International Film Festival will celebrate new talents in film and TV through the SkyShowtime Rising Star Award. Erik Svedberg-Zelman is one of the six Swedish actors nominated for the prestigious prize.

New this year is that the festival audience can also help choose the winner. The winner, who will be announced at the festival’s award ceremony on November 15, will be rewarded with an exclusive trip to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025.

On the day Iceland’s banking system collapses in 2008, trash collector Gómur Barðdal stumbles upon a severed human nose in a garbage bin outside a luxury home in central Reykjavík. Soon after, his cousin, Geir Norðann, a struggling poet, is employed as a poetry tutor for that same household.

As Icelandic society unravels, the two cousins—along with Zipo, the drive-through girl, Kata, the car dealer, and Didda, the trash lady and former prison guard of the year—set out to solve the mystery of the nose. Who does it belong to, and how did it end up in the trash? Their search pulls them into a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of Icelandic society.

Important Trash is a hilarious and gripping tale of love, intrigue, and societal collapse, bursting with narrative energy and wit.

Pascal Engman (b. 1986) is one of Sweden’s most prominent thriller authors. Engman debuted in 2017 with the standalone crime novel The Patriots and followed up with the series about detective Vanessa Frank, which has quickly become a standout in modern crime fiction.

Engman’s books have been translated into more than 20 languages and have sold over 2 million copies worldwide.

Pascal Engman’s latest book No One, the seventh installment in the Vanessa Frank series, is published by Bookmark in Sweden today.

No One is a breathtaking thriller about the present society in free fall and a new, rougher, Sweden where organized crime is spreading. But in the darkness, there is also solidarity and man’s most powerful motive: to protect its children and give them a better future.

Netflix has unveiled the first footage of The Electric State, an adaptation of the narrative art book by Simon Stålenhag. The story takes place in 1994, in the aftermath of a battle between humanity and artificial intelligence that ended in a devastating stalemate. The people who died were buried; the automatons who were destroyed rust away where they fell. The defeated robots have been banished to an “exclusion zone” in the southwestern desert, while human society attempts to rebuild without the help of the mechanical beings it created.

The Electric State is directed by the Russo brothers, and Joe Russo shared his thoughts on why the book resonated with them, stating: “The texture in the images was really powerful, and it felt like a story about broken families and broken people trying to find each other in a broken world.”

The film features a star-studded cast, including Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things, Enola Holmes) as Michelle, a young woman on a quest to find her lost brother, whom she had believed to be dead. Chris Pratt (Passengers, Marvel) plays Keats, a war veteran turned long-haul trucker involved in a smuggling operation with one of his former adversaries—a construction machine named Herman, voiced by Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). The ensemble also includes Woody Harrelson (True Detective, Triangle of Sadness) voicing the leader, Mr. Peanut, along with Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad), Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones), and Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All at Once).

The Electric State is set to premiere on Netflix early 2025.

To read more in Vanity Fair, click the “Read more” button below.