In one of the most daring debut films of the year controversial Swedish artist-turned-filmmaker Anna Odell delivers a bold, biting and unnervingly entertaining blend of fiction and documentary via a staged high school reunion that explores how the hierarchies and power structures we grow up with shape us as adults.

In 2009, the Swedish artist Anna Odell was committed to a psychiatric ward after attempting to jump off a bridge in Stockholm. Her 'suicide' turned out to be an art project – and her new film is no less controversial, playing like a conceptual art project that is both complex and highly original. Twenty years have passed since her old school class graduated and went their separate ways and excitement is in the air upon the eve of the anniversary. But Anna Odell was not invited to the reunion party by her former classmates – a seeming continuation of the bullying and treatment as an outsider she experienced all those years before.

In an effort to come to terms with these issues that have haunted her, Odell makes a fictional drama reconstructing this party, as if she attended it, allowing her to confront the childhood bullies who made her so miserable. But it doesn’t end there. After this fictional reunion, Odell doorsteps her former classmates for real to show them her film and capture their reaction. What will they make of it? Has her scathing depiction of them made her the new bully?

Made with both a formal mastery and the wild abandon of an artist unencumbered by preconceived notions of narrative filmmaking, Odell tests the limits of reality and identity and paints a controversial portrait of a society that does not want to know itself.

• The screening of The Reunion on Tue 14 July is part of our Cinébites deal: Get 30% off any main dish with a valid cinema ticket.

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