Matti Harju‘s film Yaris, Varis (Yaris, Crow) received a Special Mention in Videoex 2026 International Competition from the jury. The jury appreciated the film “for its surprisingly playful way of showing us scenes from the group of young Finnish men who are lost to themselves and society.”
The festival took place from May 22–31, 2026 in Zürich, Switzerland. Videoex is Switzerland’s largest festival dedicated to experimental film and video.
Yaris, Varis (Yaris, Crow) (2026) is a slow loss of grip on reality: the search for «objectivity» at the fringes of a society consumed by technology.
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The film is a fictional portrait of three isolated people who are drifting along the fault line between delusion and revelation. The trio becomes both architects and victims of a world coming apart, revealing a story less about revolution than about the fragile minds clinging to reality’s ruins.
Set within a context of rural decline and social fragmentation, the work approaches these figures not as anomalies, but as symptoms of prolonged disconnection. The film examines how belief systems form and harden beyond any single ideological framework, as image culture, conspiracy, and personal mythology begin to replace shared reality.
Formally, the work combines original 16 mm, Super 8, analog video and digital material, alongside a single AI-generated image* transferred onto b/w 16 mm. The film moves between near-documentary texture and constructed narrative, allowing the material qualities of each format to reflect the instability of the worlds these characters inhabit.
*The generative AI model was allowed to freely interpret the source frame, misreading its contents and hallucinating a continuation that we see in the film. No direct human intention was involved.
Matti Harju‘s works have been screened at the Rotterdam, Locarno, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Torino, BFI London, Edinburgh, AFI FEST Los Angeles and Clermont-Ferrand film festivals among others. He studied film directing at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the UK and holds an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts.
For a screener, please contact programme@av-arkki.fi.