Jonna Kina’s Somnivm (2018) and Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) will be screened at Montréal International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), held from March 19–31.
Jonna Kina‘s Somnivm will have its World Festival Premire in the international short film competition. Somnivm will be screened on Friday, March 22, at 17:45 in Pavillion Cœur des Sciences.
Somnivm incorporates filmic and sculptural works, which has been stimulated by the landscape of the marble industry, its connection to the history of anarchism and contemporary stone-working techniques in Carrara, Italy. The film captures the man made industrial landscape that originates already to Ancient Rome and as well relevantly to the Renaissance artists. At the end of the 19th century Carrara became the cradle of anarchism in Italy. The anarchist Galileo Palla remarked, “Even the stones are anarchist”.
In this contemporary re-engagement with this pearlescent mineral Kina has constructed a conceptual dialog that focuses on the complex tension that exists between culture, industry and nature, and that ultimately exists between creation and destruction. The chopped mountains, sculpted in time, lose the trace of human activity through an act of erasure in seemingly documentary footage. Filmed observation of the quarries is processed during post-production, in order to produce new images without the presence of action relating to the contemporary quarry industry: elements such as vehicles, machines, cables, containers etc. are erased digitally afterwards from the scenes. The absence created by these modifications, opens up the footage towards poetic or post-human readings, and in so doing, perhaps makes reference to an anarchist factions that developed at the Carrara in the 19th century, and the part they played in the Lunigiana revolt of 1894.
Sami van Ingen: Flame (2018)
Sami van Ingen‘s Flame (2018) will be screened in the experimental film programme on Saturday, March 23, at 20:30, in Pavillion J. W. McConnell.
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.
The 37th Montréal International Festival of Films on Art, March 19–31 2019, Montréal, Canada
More information: FIFA
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.