Jaakko Pietiläinen’s, Marja Helander’s, and Elina Oikari’s short films at Nordic Film Days Lübeck

Jaakko Pietiläinen’s Shrouds Have No Pockets (2021, in featured image), Marja Helander’s Suodji (2020), and Elina Oikari’s Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings (2021) were picked for the short film selection of Nordic Film Days Lübeck, held from November 3-7 2021 both on-site and online.

Marja Helander‘s Suodji (Shelter) will be screened on Wednesday, November 3, at 22:15 in CineStar Cinema 1. Suodji is an adaptation of an old story from Utsjoki, Sápmi, to the present. It is a legend of the director’s relative, Ovllá-Ivvár Helander, and about what he did during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 in Utsjoki. Ovllá-Ivvár decided to fool Death and take his fate into his own hands. Today we are facing a similar threat in the form of coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. The protagonist of the film is walking in Ovllá-Ivvár’s footsteps. But at the end, who is really who?

Marja Helander: Suodji (2020)

Jaakko Pietiläinen‘s Shrouds Have No Pockets will have its world festival premiere on Friday, November 5, at 22:15 in CineStar Cinema 1. N.N. is on a holiday. He’s enjoying a complimentary stay at a premium hotel accompanied by a curated menu of equally complimentary experiences. In return, N.N. is asked to take a daily trip with the iGum – a proprietary, smartphone operated device, capable of accessing, altering and recording the consciousness of its user through dental nerve access. Shrouds Have no Pockets is a post-cinematic sequel of Chris Markers La Jetée. Combining 3d-animation and filmed POV-footage it studies the relation of an assumed immediate reality and mediated experiences such as dreams, memories, games or films. Shrouds Have no Pockets shares its key themes of time, perception and memory with La Jetée and relocates them into contemporary contexts of late stage capitalism, ubiquitously circulated images and an increasingly automated visual production.

Elina Oikari‘s Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings will also have its world premiere at Nordic Film Days Lübeck. The short film will be screened on Saturday, November 6, at 22:15 in CineStar Cinema 1. In Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings, the filmmaker relates her vision for directing a neo-Western in grainy, transitory images. She imagines that the greatest hurdle her protagonists, Yassine and Hami, will have to face will be the friendly but firm rejection of Finnish society. When violence on the imaginary frontier escalates in the form of a flying potato, the ‘fictitious’ figures begin to speak about their real experiences.

Elina Oikari: Flying Potato and Other Misunderstandings (2021)

Nordic Film Days Lübeck, November 3-7 2021, Germany

More information: Nordic Film Days Lübeck


AV-ARKKI HAS PROMOTED AND DISTRIBUTED FINNISH MEDIA ART SINCE 1989. AV-ARKKI’S PROMOTIONAL EFFORTS HAVE MADE THE ARTISTS’ PARTICIPATION IN THIS EVENT POSSIBLE.