Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) and Laura Horelli’s Namibia Today (2018) have been selected for the Experimenta selection of the BFI London Film Festival. The 62nd BFI London Film Festival is held from October 10–21. Experimenta is the festival’s branch dedicated to films and videos by artists who transform our experience of seeing moving images.
Sami van Ingen’s Flame is included in the screening “Today Is the Thing of the Past“, in BFI Southbank, on Saturday, October 13, at 13:45.
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.
Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. He lives and works in Helsinki. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses random or found materials in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).
Flame has previously won the Best Film by Audience Jury Award at Fronteira International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Brasil, a honorary mention at Art Film Fest, Košice, Slovakia, and a diploma of merit in the national competition of Tampere Film Festival. It has been screened at several international film festivals, including Rotterdam, Edinburg, and Karlovy Vary.
Laura Horelli’s Namibia Today is included in the screening “Twenty-Two Hours“, in ICA Cinema on Tuesday, October 16, at 21:00.
Horelli: Namibia Today (2018)
Namibia Today premiered at Forum Expanded programme of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival. Seven people wait in an underground station below Karl-Marx-Allee in former East Berlin. Billboards line the walls, each combining a front page of “Namibia Today” with associative material. “Namibia Today” was a journal of the Namibian liberation movement, which was printed and distributed by the GDR during times of military confrontation with South Africa. SWAPO’s (South West Africa People’s Organisation) editorial board was forced to operate from exile in Angola, and without the ideologically motivated help of the GDR the mass production of the periodical (1980–1985) would not have been possible. Rushing underground trains pick up the slow moving shot between the billboards and the protagonists, between fragments of image and speech. The participants with their memories and diverse ways of storytelling stand still in the movement. Namibia Today has been previously screened in the German competition of Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.
Laura Horelli (b. 1976, Helsinki) lives in Berlin and works with experimental documentary video. She is interested in representations and mediations of the past taking on a microhistorical approach. Her works have been exhibited at Venice Biennale (2001, 2009), Manifesta 5, (2004), ARS 11, Kiasma (2001, 2011), Galerie Barbara Weiss (2003, 2007, 2011) and Badischer Kunstverein (2014). She has participated in film festivals like Berlinale Forum Expanded (2017, 2018), IndieLisboa (2017), Kasseler Dokfest (2013) and CPH:DOX (2009). In 2011, she received the Hannah Höch Prize for Young Artists.
The 62nd BFI London Film Festival, October 10–21 2018
More information: BFI London FF