Iona Roisin’s An Uncountable Number of Threads (featured image), Anu Pennanen’s 50, 100 Years From Now, Azar Saiyar’s Solar Book and Milja Viita & Veli Granö’s The King will be screened at Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF), held from November 23rd to December 1st, 2024 in Beijing, China.
Iona Roisin’s An Uncountable Number of Threads (2023) is screened in the International Competition.
Travel films have an established format with their own conventions, history and baggage. It is a medium that has all too often sought to control, define and dictate perceptions of ”other” places. Comprised of footage shot while travelling on group excursions across Russia in 2019, An Uncountable Number of Threads is an attempt to draw out the ethical restrictions of a travelogue, while questioning how (and why) to make one. At times there is an awkward tourist-gaze, aware of its outsider position. But as a self-reflexive work that considers its own creation, it ultimately unravels, as the artist rationalises themselves out of a particular way of working, inviting the viewer into their uncertainty.
Anu Pennanen’s 5, 10, 100 Years from Now (2023) looks to the future in an era of resource-based conflict and global environmental crisis. The short essay video is based on Neste gas station customer’s reflections on what the future will look like. 5, 50, 100 Years from Now weaves together people’s imagination with the associative imagery of the circulation of cars and the filling of petrol tanks – the endlessly rotating movement of fossil economy.
The film is screened in the section titled Future Ethics.
Azar Saiyar’s Solar Book (2024) looks at what remains and what gets lost, when a thing becomes a museum object? Many details have gone missing, but the museum objects of Satakunta Museum bear a strong presence of waters running next to it: things that the river and the sea have carried, things that were born, that live and once lived because of them and beside them.
The film is screened in the section titled Echo: Peering into Archival Filmmaking.
Milja Viita & Veli Granö’s The King (2024) is about a miraculous incident in Somero, Finland. Local musician Rauli Badding Somerjoki sent his song “Lights” to Elvis in 1975. He hoped an artist he admired would perform it. Badding’s song could have lifted Elvis’ career to a new height, even revolutionized the history of music. Badding believed and waited, but got no answer from the USA. Elvis passed two years later, in 1977. It is told that peculiar potatoes were found in a field in Somero the same fall.
The film is screened in the section titled Echo: Peering into Archival Filmmaking.
Beijing International Short Film Festival (BISFF)
November 23rd to December 1st
Beijing, China
More information: BISFF 2024
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!