Matti Harju’s Ecstasy (2023, in featured image) and Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s Those Who Kept the Light / Seaweed (2022) will be screened at 25FPS International Experimental Film and Media Festival, held from September 27–30 2023 in Zagreb, Croatia.

Ecstasy will be screened in competition 5, titled INT/EXT, taking place in Kino Kinoteka on Friday September 29 2023 at 20:00. Set in the darkest time of the year, a feverish and delirious film about a small and ever-shrinking island – the Ecstasy – located somewhere between the search for pleasure and the inherently destructive powers of capitalism.

Matti Harju has screened work at the Rotterdam, Locarno, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Torino, BFI London, Edinburgh, AFI FEST Los Angeles and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals among others. He studied film directing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the UK and holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.

Those Who Kept the Light / Seaweed will be screened in competition 4, titled The Power of Goodbye, taking place in Kino Kinoteka on Friday September 29 2023 at 18:00. Those Who Kept the Light is a series of videos exploring our dependent relationship with the sea, in a context of queer and feminist maritime narratives. The narratives are told through the context of human and other-than-human love stories; the wind or the ocean are seen as entities with consciousness, emotions and a voice. Those Who Kept the Light investigates the importance of vulnerability, desire and memory through myths and open-ended narratives. Within the wider framework of climate emergency and the role of the fragile ecosystems of the ocean, the project explores the collective mindset of imagination and longing. Unfolding epic and barren Nordic landscapes, the narrator leads the viewer into spaces and places of solace, empowerment and emotion.

Nastja Säde Rönkkö (b. 1985) is an artist living in London and Helsinki. She works with video, performance, installation, participatory art, internet and text. She has exhibited and performed internationally in places such as Somerset House, London, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, SXSW, Austin, TX, Royal Academy of Arts, London, FACT, Foundation for Art and Technology, Liverpool and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Recent solo exhibitions include for those yet to be, EMMA Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2020), Altered Breaths, Future Feelings at Tampere Art Museum, Finland and for your charred bones and restless soul, Aboa Vetus, Art Nova, Turku, Finland (2019). She is the 35th recipient of the Young Artist of the Year 2019 title and award. Forthcoming projects include Glasgow International ja XXV Mänttä Art Festival 2021.

25 FPS, September 27–30 2023, Zagreb, Croatia

More information: 25 FPS

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible. If you want to hear the latest news from our distribution, subscribe to our newsletter!