Anssi Kasitonni’s Sakke (2019) and Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker (2019) were selected for the international short film competition of the 33rd Stuttgarter Filmwinter, held from January 16–19 in Germany.
Sakke will be screened in the International Competition Short Films 5 on Saturday, January 19, at 20:00, and on Sunday, January 20, at 16:00. Both screenings take place in FITZ! Cinema. Sakke is a snowboarder who is going to make a film about himself with his friend.
Anssi Kasitonni is a skateboarder and an award-winning artist from Sahalahti, Finland. He has worked in music, drawing and sculpture, but to many of his fans, the most beloved of his works are the short films he makes at his own farm. The films deal with age-old questions related to morality, love, death, generation gaps, sexuality and, of course, submarines. The ideas are epic, the films decidedly homespun. His movies create their own world that tells us something essential about ours. Kasitonni won the esteemed Ars Fennica Award in 2011.
Pilvi Takala’s The Stroker is based on Takala’s two week-long intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young entrepreneurs and startups. During the intervention Takala posed as a wellness consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel Touch who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services in the workplace.
The Stroker is included in the International Competition Short Films 4, screened on Saturday, January 19, at 14:00 in tri-bühne, and on Sunday, January 20, at at 11:00 in FITZ! Cinema.
Pilvi Takala (b. 1981) lives and works between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption. Her work has been shown in MoMA PS1 and New Museum, Kiasma, Palais de Tokyo, Kunsthalle Basel, Manifesta 11, Witte de With, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial. Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013.
The 33rd Stuttgarter Filmwinter, January 16–19 2020, Germany
More information: Stuttgarter Filmwinter