Jonna Kina’s Arr. for a Scene (2017) and Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance (2018) were selected for In Silico Experimental Short Film Competition of the 28th International Film Festival Message to Man, held in St. Petersburg from September 15–22.
Awarded as the Best Nordic Short Film at Nordisk Panorama 2017, 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 (b. 1984, Lappeenranta, Finland) 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.
Jonna Kina: Arr. for a Scene (2017)
Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance will have its world festival premiere at International Film Festival Message to Man
Googoosh, a popular and loved Iranian-Azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song Ayrılıq – Separation. The performance is from a 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. Ayrılıq could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi (who fled from Soviet Azerbaijan to Iran and left many of his loved ones behind) wanted to make music about his sense of longing.
“I was searching for another song when I found this performance on YouTube. I could watch the video again and again and try to get a deeper understanding of it. I could use the performance as a mirror for the part in me that is of Iranian and Azeri origin. I could compare my sense of longing with the degraded video image and the lyrics of the song. And in my eyes the found video grew into a monument of distance – a presentation of disconnection, images, memory and mixed identification.”
Azar Saiyar is Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards ways of looking, speaking, remembering and telling stories. She also does collaborative works with other artists. Saiyar’s films have been screened at international film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums and on television.
The 28th International Film Festival Message to Man, 15.–22.2018, St. Petersburg, Russia
More information: IFF Message to Man