My first full day in Helsinki started off with a free morning to do some business, visit the Videotheque to screen films and to wander around the city a bit and sight-see by the light of the snow. Actually, all screenings started in the late afternoon in the theaters so more locals could attend. This left a lot of breathing room in my schedule which was fab, to say the least, not to mention the extra sleep.
I had a long, lovely lunch meeting with Festival Director, Erkko Lyytinen and Canadian filmmaker, journalist and teacher, Peter Wintonick (who co-directed his latest documentary project, PilgrIMAGE, with his daughter Mira), to discuss bringing a North American program of some sort to DocPoint next year and to talk about the overall landscape of media making and what international festivals can continue to offer in this fast-changing world of ours.
After spending the rest of the afternoon floating through the Finnish Museum of Natural History which was directly across from my hotel (yet another gorgeous building), I joined fellow international guests for dinner for some more conversation at the official festival "klubi." After dinner, I went back to Bio Rex for another DocPoint tradition, a screening of a silent movie concert. This year's offering was a British film from 1916, Battle of the Somme, a famous battle captured on celluloid from WWI. The film was accompanied by live music performed by DJ and re-mix master, Jori Hulkkonen. The 35mm film (I was close enough to the booth to hear the whir of the projector, a sound one doesn't hear too often anymore) was made by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell to boost British support for the war and to keep those enlisted men coming. It's a piece of supreme, and quite effective, propaganda crafted to feed the hungry war machine. The few fighting scenes that are shown are totally staged and the huge number of fatalities is never mentioned in any of the cards that narrate the piece, nor is the incompetence and negligence of the high military command ever mentioned. Plus ça change. For contemporary audiences, however, it garnered very strong reactions and is, in fact, in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Hulkkonen's haunting, multi-layered and sensitive original score, all performed quite economically on small synthesizers and MacbookPros, helped transport the, mostly young, audience back to a place and time where war and death on this scale had never been imagined.
The festival's other special screenings were just as engaging and included Suomi Post Mortem, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jan Harlan's Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Yung Chang's multiple-award winner, Up the Yangtze, and Mohammad Shirvani's 7 Blind Women Filmmakers.
The next day, a small group of us were invited to visit the Finnish Film Foundation (pictured right), a state-of-the-art facility and the major funder and producer of documentaries and feature films, responsible for exporting Finnish film works out into the larger world. It was a truly international gang which included programmers, festival directors and commissioning editors from Estonia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Sheffield (UK), Sunny Side of the Doc (France), Turkey and Norway. And a lone Yank, yours truly. I'm doing something right, apparently, to find myself in this company.
Irina Krohn, the Managing Director, welcomed us and gave us a tour of the beautiful black box SES Auditorium located within the complex which can be rented out to anyone and can screen just about any format you can throw at the projectionist. The Foundation is an independent entity supervised by the Department for Cultural Policy and all personnel are nominated for their posts. There are three main channels of financing for film projects in Finland: the Foundation, the television broadcasters and something called AVEK, a fund where artists donate some or all of the money they earn through copyrights of their work. This is gathered into a collective pot and goes towards education and filmmaking support--individual earnings go into a fund that can be shared. Maybe once US filmmakers can earn some money from their artistic projects (and put food on the table), something like that can be started here. One can dream.
After this, I went into high gear and scooted from one screening to another, not only to check out all the beautiful venues, but to share the cinema experience with local audiences. I headed to the Ateneum Art Museum (bookstore pictured). Each building in this town is more beautiful than the last, a true aesthete's delight. I caught the last part of the student films that were being shown from the Finnish film schools. It's exciting to see works from young filmmakers still forming their visions of the world and honing their storytelling chops. All were quite good, exceedingly proficient, and artfully produced. Standouts for me were Antti Tuomikoski's Quite Expensive Shit and Liinu Grönlund's Souvenir. Jani Peltonen found a superb subject in Tauno Keto for her fine piece, The Great Mill, and Elina Talvensaari tells her touching story of indigent people at a drop-in center by focusing on The Invisible Hand.
Next I hit the Bristol, another incredibly beautiful cinema for a short piece called Meaning of Life by Finnish filmmaker, Visa Koiso-Kanttila, only to find myself in the borough of Queens! Koiso-Kanttila is one of Finland's most prolific filmmakers but works close to the bone in creating quite intimate portraits. He made Meaning of Life, a poetic 11-minute film shot on S16mm black and white, HDCAM and Digibeta with Dolby Digital stereo sound (!!) about people's ideas on how they seek happiness and what the "good life" represents to these inhabitants of Queens, New York, most of them first- or second-generation immigrants with very little to show in the way of material success or any outer vestiges of the "American Dream." Visa studied at the New School in 2000-2001, and this short, which sat in a drawer for many years, is his tribute to that experience.
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