Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic (2020) has been chosen to be screened at Cine de Huesca in Huesca, Spain, and Pyeongchang International Peace Film Festival, in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
At Cine de Huesca, the film is part of the International Short Film Competition in the Documentary section, and will be shown as part of the Session 5 screening. The physical screening will take place on Monday, June 13 at 19:30 local time. The screening is also available online from June 11 to June 19.
At PIPFF, the film is part of the Pyongyang Cinema section, which introduces short films and feature films related to North Korea. The Fantastic will be screened twice, on Sunday, June 20 at 10:30 local time, and on Monday, June 21 at 20:30 local time.
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.
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 internatonal and national festivals, television, art museums and exhibitions.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Huesca, 11 – 19 June 2021, Huesca, Spain and online
Pyeongchang International Peace Film Festival, 16 – 22 June 2021, Pyeongchang, South Korea