Featured image: Jade Kallio: Ocean Blvd
Our catalogue offers a diverse portrait of recent single channel art works by artists and filmmakers based in Finland.
AV-arkki’s Distribution catalogue 2024–2025 is intended for professional preview. The catalogue is distributed via AV-arkki’s international distribution programme for professional audiences in numerous events, film festivals and art fairs worldwide. Single channel works have been selected for the Distribution Catalogue 2024-2025 by guest curator Pamela Cohn together with AV-arkki’s personnel.
The Distribution Catalogue 2024–2025 consists of the following titles:
Sanna Liljander: When Will the Day Break
When should you let go of what used to be? If you let go, do you have to give up the dreams? And will memories start to fade? When Will the Day Break is a documentary love film that travels on the borders of dreams, memories, hope and realism.
Milja Viita: Skönärit
“We haven’t seen land or a beacon for hours”, the captain writes in the ship’s log on the fateful evening of December 8, 1925, the weather being foggy and windy. After 99 years, the half-seaman of the ship, young Jalmar Yrjänen introduces five distant ports for us. Skönärit is a collage film which consists of small gauge footage filmed by seafarers and written documents found in archives.
Jade Kallio: Ocean Blvd
In reference to a Lana Del Rey song, Ocean Blvd poetically explores the politics of architecture, safe spaces, and visibility from a trans person’s perspective. The work blends fictional and non-fictional narratives to outline the boundaries of reality; Sometimes our dreams or imagined worlds are more real than the world around us.
Anssi Kasitonni: Pena’s Special Hauling
Pena has been driving a semi-truck for 50 years and that’s the way he wants it to be in the future as well. He has some slight memory issues but it is not going to stop him.
Marjo Levlin: Underdog
The essay short film Underdog sniffs and explores the world of dogs and people. In the 2-channel B&W experimental documentary, the author’s childhood experiences of clashes between two social classes and language groups, parents living in different countries and living in a life of scarcity (which was shameful without being bleak or lacking creative solutions) have inspired her to examine the lives of pedigree dogs, which, with breeding, take on increasingly crazy, sickly characteristics that parallel her observations of the human world, the art world and life in the contradictory territory in which more and more people live in a multicultural world.
Jan Ijäs: Two Forests
Jan Ijäs explores modern folklore, anecdotes, rumours, beliefs and various phenomena in his essay films. Two Forests reflects on the end of human life and the final disposal: aging and death. This time, the setting is the aging and ailing Japan and its forest-related death myths. Two Forests also takes two approaches to death. Although people normally die of an illness or accident, in extreme cases individuals can decide for themselves when it is time to go – or the decision may be made for them by someone else.
Vesa-Pekka Rannikko: Rat and Border Dog
“Rat and Border Dog” is a poetic animation fable about a zone created by humans, but without humans. The animation reflects on the border and its insignificance for nature. Closed to humans, these green lines offer nature its own free zone.
The work appears as a changing ecosystem, from which the viewer picks up a piece from there, another from here. The subject and form of the work is like a wasteland, where things have the opportunity to create surprising meanings without being bound by a predefined order. Human logic takes a back seat.
“Rat and Border Dog” is drawn and written mostly outside, slowly as part of the environment. The soundscape realized with human voice was composed and realized by vocalist Sarah Albu.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö: salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears
The video takes its starting point from a commonly held – yet incorrect – belief that blood contains the same amount of salt as sea water. Three narrators – a teardrop, a drop of Golden blood and a droplet of sweat – tell their own stories of love and loss. The video is driven by a poetic text: an intimate verse with an ambiguity that delivers a metanarrative for lost and found identity, a scarred planet and our ever-changing world.
Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen: Final Scenes of Disaster Movies
The film opens with static documentary shots from Kansalaistori, a large square in the center of Helsinki. A voiceover explains the concept behind the participatory movie: People of Helsinki were invited to plan an ending for an imaginary disaster movie. The movie should end at Kansalaistori. Out of 105 proposals, three final scenes were selected and filmed. They were acted entirely by volunteers from Helsinki.