
Elli Vuorinen is this year’s invited filmmaker for Flatpack Festival‘s Dots & Loops screening. She presents her own films with a selection of shorts that have been important to her. In addition to Vuorinen’s Still Lives (2019), the competition selection of Flatpack Festival includes Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) and Jonna Kina’s Arr. for a Scene (2017). Combining films, performances and other forms, Flatpack Festival is held from April 30 to May 6 in Birmingham, UK.
Elli Vuorinen’s Dots & Loops Screening takes place on Thursday, May 2, at 20:15 in Flatpack Hub. Still Lives will be screened in the international short film competition of Flatpack Festival in the programme “Metamorphosis“, on Friday, May 3, at 18:00, and on Saturday, May 4, at 10:00. Still Lives studies the concept of busy stillness, explored from various standpoints as museum artefacts from all around the world reflect on the mundane challenges of modern life.
Jonna Kina’s Arr. for a Scene and Sami van Ingen’s Flame are included in the competition programme “Sound Bite“, screened on Saturday, May 4, at 14:00.
Arr. for a Scene is a documentary of two foley artists while they are producing sounds for one of the most famous film scene in the film history (the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960). This performance is documented on 35 mm film. The original film scene will remain invisible while the viewer sees only the foley artists creating sound effects for the scene, such as footsteps, shower and door closing. During the performance, the foley artists are looking straight at the camera. The film inverts the position of the screen and the gaze of the viewer. The viewer becomes part of the scene. The film examines the way sounds are constructed for the use of cinema and what happens when the structures of a film are dismantled into parts.
Flame is a fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Flatpack Festival, April 30 – May 6 2019, Birmingham, UK
More information: Flatpack Festival