Saara Ekström’s Amnion (2023, in featured image) and Hanna Hovitie’s Square the Circle (2023) will be screened at the 20th Akbank Short Film Festival, held from March 25 – April 4 2024 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Hanna Hovitie’s Square the Circle will be screened in the international competition on Friday, March 29, at 15:30 and on Tuesday, April 2, at 20:30. Square the Circle ponders: How to be a circle in a square world? In a two-dimensional space, out of time, a person seeks their belonging to the world through a journey to infinity.

Hanna Hovitie (born in 1991) is a film director and video artist from Helsinki, Finland. Her films have been shown and awarded at several prominent international festivals such as DOK Leipzig, Melbourne International Film Festival, Sheffield DocFest, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Saara Ekström’s Amnion will be screened in the programme “Perspectives” on Friday, March 29, at 13:00. Landfills on the fringes of cities reveal all about our culture, habits, fears and desires. Here treasures turn into trash and the excess of our discarded welfare and cheap labor dances in the wind. Shot in 8mm film, Amnion (innermost membrane enclosing an embryo) is a dark and melancholy vision, where the organic merges with the synthetic, polymer molecules imitate the DNA helix, and new life begins to take shape under transparent folds of plastic wrapping.

Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Chronotopes where time and place densify, time that nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are at the core of her art. Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the State Prize for Visual Arts in 2023, the Finnish media art prize AVEK Award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.

Akbank Short Film Festival, March 25 – April 4 2024, Istanbul, Turkey

More information: Akbank Short Film Festival

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!