Jan Ijäs’s Waste no. 4 New York, New York (2019, in featured image) and Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic (2020) were selected for the Short Dox programme of MakeDox Creative Documentary Film Festival, held from August 19–26 in Macedonia. This year, the festival is arranged as a hybrid of live and online screenings.
Jan Ijäs’s Waste no. 4 New York, New York will be screened on Monday, August 24, at 23:00. Waste no. 4 New York, New York revisits the history of the City in twenty minutes through twelve cemeteries and one landfill. The short documentary is the fourth, independent episode from the ten-part Waste series.
Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic will be screened on Wednesday, August 26, at 22:30. 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.
The Fantastic was also selected for the short competition of DOKer Moscow International Documentary Film Festival, held from August 21–30.