Azar Saiyar, Anssi Kasitonni and Elina Oikari are part of Encounters Film Festival’s international competition. Azar Saiyar’s short film My home (2022, in featured image) and Elina Oikari’s Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings (2021) will be screened in “Stories of a present past” screening. Le Saboteur by Anssi Kasitonni (2022) is part of the “Laughing my shorts off” screening. Encounters Film Festival will be held in UK on September 27 – October 2 2022.

My Home (2022) goes through various archives, both personal and public, from different times and from different moments of life. It tries to remember. These ingredients do not build a single coherent narrative, one pure argument, a continuously developing story of growth, nor a piece that is solely a person’s own. We know and remember things even if they have not happened to us. Fragmented memories of childhood and adulthood blend together in a song that an unknown narrator is humming.

Azar Saiyar is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards ways of looking, remembering and storytelling. Her films have been screened at international film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums and broadcast on television.

In Elina Oikari’s Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings a filmmaker tells about her vision of directing a neo-western about two newcomers in Finland. When violence on the imaginary frontier escalates in the form of a flying potato, the ‘fictitious’ figures begin to speak about their real experiences.

Elina Oikari is a filmmaker who works with fiction, documentary, and alternative film. She has graduated with a Master of Arts from the ELO Film School Finland in Aalto University majoring in documentary film directing (2014). Oikari’s work often explores current social themes connected with timeless places and stories. Using a sharp palette of absurd humor and reflective visual language she aims to push the boundaries of cinema.

In Le Saboteur an ex-saboteur gets back in the game and every trick will be exposed! A short action film about the joint adventure of indie filmmaking – with all the special effects.

Anssi Kasitonni is a skateboarder and an award-winning artist from Sahalahti, Finland. He has worked in music, drawing and sculpture, but to many of his fans, the most beloved of his works are the short films he makes at his own farm. The films deal with age-old questions related to morality, love, death, generation gaps, sexuality and, of course, submarines. The ideas are epic, the films decidedly homespun. His movies create their own world that tells us something essential about ours. Kasitonni won the esteemed Ars Fennica Award in 2011.

Encounters Film Festival, September 27- October 2 2022, Bristol, United Kingdom.

More information: Encounters 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.