Niina Suominen’s Golden Headacher (2022, in featured image), Hanna Hovitie’s Square the Circle (2023), and Marja Viitahuhta’s Dološ Niegut (2022) were selected for the international competition of Stuttgarter Filmwinter, held from January 17–23 2024 in Germany.

Hanna Hovitie’s Square the Circle will be screened in the International Competition 4, on Saturday, January 20 2024, at 14:00 in FITZ! Cinema im Festival-Palace. How to be a circle in a square world? In a two-dimensional space, out of time, a person seeks their belonging to the world through a journey to infinity.

Niina Suominen’s Golden Headacher and Marja Viitahuhta’s Dološ Niegut will be screened in the International Competition 6, on Sunday, January 21, at 14:00 in FITZ! Cinema im Festival-Palace.

Golden Headacher is an experimental animation documentary about women’s hate and aggression and the culturally sanctioned ways to express or suppress these uneasy feelings. The dialogue is constructed from experiences of women dealing with feelings of aggression towards children and spouses and between women. At the same time, the dialogue comments on cultural norms related to the expression of aggression by women. The film was created by animating textile and décor waste and beautiful glossy pictures of children that were popular in Scandinavia in the last century. The material was improvised using the qualities of different fabrics and objects as the basis for the images. The work brings to the fore the irritation and exhaustion felt by women and the thoughts often left unsaid outside the walls of home. Also the remorse and the shame felt after the bursts of anger are reflected on.

The memories and documented imagery of reindeer herding and nomadic ways of life mix with the contemporary herding of reindeers in Dološ Niegut – Ancient dreams, an experimental music video to a track by Ánnámáret, Ilkka Heinonen and Turkka Inkilä from the album Nieguid duovdagat. How we perceive our everyday life affects our views as well as our imagination, our hopes and dreams. The lives connected to other beings, in this case the reindeer and how the Sámi people have lived in relation to it as well as our dependency with our environment, is present in this work. In this yoik, Ánnámáret also reaches to imagine how our predecessors perceived this world and what may remain of them in the currents of the time that we live in and in the ways we function in it. The video is part of a continuum of video works made in collaboration with Viitahuhta, Ánnámáret, Heinonen and Inkilä.

Stuttgarter Filmwinter, January 17–23 2024, Stuttgart, Germany

More information: Stuttgarter Filmwinter

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. If you want to hear the latest news from our distribution, subscribe to our newsletter!