Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic was awarded with Honorable Mention at FEMCINE11 International Short Film Competition, held from March 23–28 in Chile. The jury states:
“For being an audiovisual proposal that threads very well the materials, the documentary record, the sound interviews and the visual effects, achieving a deep and interesting cinematographic piece. The script work, in a subtle way, builds a vivid account of the lack of freedom and repression. It is a testimony from innocence that makes us reflect on the transforming power of cinema and allows us to visualize our own identity.”
The next screening of The Fantastic will take place at Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil et du Val de Marne, held online in France from April 2–11.
The Fantastic is a film about encountering the unknown and the relationship between imagination and reality. The film is built on interviews with exiled North Koreans, who describe what they imagined the outside world to be like, based on their experiences of watching smuggled western fiction films. Alternating documentary footage and visual effects, the film raises the question of how reality is defined and what we wish to believe in. The Fantastic reverses the set-up where westerners are peeping in on the everyday life of the closed-off state. In this film, it is the North Koreans who direct their curiosity at the outside world and imagine what life in Western countries is like. Recently, it was selected as a nominee for Jussi Award for the Best Short Film in Finland.
Maija Blåfield is an artist and an experimental documentary filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. Her works often combine documentary and fiction in some way, exploring the fantastic side of our everyday life and digging up the stories from its events. She was granted the State Prize for the Media Arts in 2014 and in 2017, she was a nominee for Ars Fennica award for contemporary art. Her works have been screened in international and national festivals, television, art museums and exhibitions.
FEMCINE11 International Short Film Competition, March 23–28 2021, Chile
More information: FEMCINE11