Emilia Ukkonen’s Story of Ned (2017), Jonna Kina’s Arr. for a Scene (2017), and Pekka Sassi’s A Friend (2016) are screened at The Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival. The 33rd edition of the acknowledged festival is held from November 14–19.
Pekka Sassi’s experimental video is included in the programme “Short and Sweet”, screened on Wednesday, November 15 at 22:15.
A Friend is a happy hippie kinetic film. A Friend is a contructive abstract short film about something cold and distant turning into warm and friendly. It’s a kinetic folksong. Hooray to Liz Rhodes and Donovan.
Pekka Sassi is a Helsinki-based artist whose output consists of experimental sound and video works, many of which are purely sound pieces and audio installations. Sassi’s works are characterised by creative integration of simple, and sometimes random, audial and visual worlds detected in the surrounding world. He is a wide-ranging, yet uncompromising artist. His works have been presented at several domestic and foreign festivals and he was awarded the annual AVEK Prize for audio-visual art in 2006 and the Best film in European Media Art Festival, Osnabrücke 2010.
Sassi: A Friend (2016)
Awarded as the Best Nordic Short Film at Nordisk Panorama, Jonna Kina’s experimental documentary film is screened in the programme “Rehearsals in Progress” on Saturday, November 18 at 17:30.
Arr. for a Scene is a documentary of two foley artists while they are producing sounds for one of the most famous film scene in the film history (the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960). This performance is documented on 35 mm film. The original film scene will remain invisible while the viewer sees only the foley artists creating sound effects for the scene, such as footsteps, shower and door closing. During the performance, the foley artists are looking straight at the camera. The film inverts the position of the screen and the gaze of the viewer. The viewer becomes part of the scene. The film examines the way sounds are constructed for the use of cinema and what happens when the structures of a film are dismantled into parts.
Jonna Kina is a multidisciplinary artist who works with photography, video, sound and text. She has studied in Helsinki, New York and Jerusalem. Kina’s works have been presented in numerous exhibitions such as Museo Amparo, Puebla (2016), Gallery AMA, Helsinki (2016), Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago (2016), Kunsthalle, Helsinki (2016), Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2015), Finnish Museum of Photography (2015), Finnish Institute, Stockholm (2014), Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid (2014) and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg (2014). In 2013 she received a special mention from the jury of Photo Levallois Award and was nominated by the by Hasselblad Foundation’s Victor Fellowship Award and in 2014 by the Source Cord Prize.
Kina: Arr. for a Scene (2017)
Emilia Ukkonen’s short documentary film will have its world festival premiere at Kassel DokFest in the programme “Forever and Ever”, screened on Saturday, November 18 at 22:15.
Story of Ned tells about a cat who was unusual cat in many ways. First encountered as a kitten, sold out of a cardboard box in a Tokyo department store, Ned traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Japan at least twice, perhaps even four times. The man who ended up with Ned never wanted him, and made several efforts to pass him on to others. But somehow, Ned’s time with those other people was always short-lived and came to a tragic end, and Ned always stubbornly came back.
Emilia Ukkonen has studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. She currently works in Helsinki. She uses moving image as her main tool, but is equally comfortable working with other mediums. Ukkonen’s work has been exhibited both in Finland and abroad, e.g. Kunsthalle Helsinki, Design Museum Helsinki, Helsinki City Art Museum’s Kluuvi gallery, Kunsti Modern Art Museum in Vaasa, Finland, Prague Triennale and Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris.
The Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, 14.–19.11.2017, Germany
More information: Kassel DokFest