Marja Helander’s Birds in the Earth (2018) and Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker (2019) will be screened in the European Competition of Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, held from April 3–7 in Netherlands. Go Short is the main festival for short film in the Netherlands.

Marja Helander’s Birds in the Earth will be screened in the competition screening 9 “Rewriting history”, on Friday, April 5, at 18:15.

Marja Helander: Birds in the Earth (2018)

Birds in the Earth is a short film based on dance. The main characters are two young Sámi ballet students; Birit and Katja Haarla. The movie tells a bit melancholic story through their dance performances. At the same time it examines the deeper questions of the ownership of Sámi land.

Marja Helander (b.1965) is a Finnish photographic and video artist. She graduated from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1999. Her earlier work explored her own identity between the Finnish and the Sámi culture. Helander’s recent photographic work has focused on Northern landscape. The accent of the work is on the postcolonial topics in the Sámi area, focusing particularly on the global mining industry. The encounter between nature and mankind is not harmonious, but destructive. On the other hand, her video works are playful, exploring the contradiction between the traditional Sámi way of life and the modern society. Her recent short film Birds in the Earth won the Risto Jarva Prize in Tampere Film Festival 2018. Marja Helander has participated in solo and group exhibitions and her works have been acquired for various public collections in Finland and abroad.

Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker is included in the competition screening 8 “I’m Here for You”, screened on Friday, April 5, at 19:45.

Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker will have its North American premire at Hot Docs. The Stroker is based on Takala’s two week-long intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. During the intervention Takala posed as a wellness consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel Touch who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services in the workplace.

Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) lives and works between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption. Her work has been shown in MoMA PS1 and New Museum, Kiasma, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta 11, Witte de With, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial. Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.

Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, April 3–7 2019, Netherlands

More information: Go Short ISFF

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.