Anssi Kasitonni’s Saladdin Castique (2018), Marja Helander’s Birds in the Earth (2018), and Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) will be screened in the short film selection of the Scandinavian Film Week in México City. The Scandinavian Film Week takes place at Cineteca Nacional and Cine Tonalá between July 23–28.
In Saladdin Castique, a man walks in the forest and tries to find berries. He finds instead an empty French salad dressing bottle. A genie comes out of the bottle and grants the man three wishes. The man uses the wishes traditionally but he uses bad language all the time and the genie does not like it. The man is going to learn a lesson.
Birds in the Earth is a short film based on dance. The main characters are two young Sámi ballet students; Birit and Katja Haarla. The movie tells a bit melancholic story through their dance performances. At the same time it examines the deeper questions of the ownership of Sámi land.
Flame is a fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Scandinavian Film Week, July 23–28 2019, México City, México
More information: Cineteca Nacional