Maarit Suomi-Väänänen’s Minispectacles As Nice as Pies (2017), Marja Viitahuhta’s The Inland Sea (2017), and Timo Wright’s Embrace (2016) were selected in the international short film competition of the Stuttgarter Filmwinter; Jukka Silokunnas’s Vanishing Point (2017) competes in the 2 Minutes Short Film Competition of the same festival. The 31st edition of the festival is held from February 8–11.
Maarit Suomi-Väänänen’s Minispectacles As Nice As Pies (2017) follows North African refugees making Karelian Pies, Finnish national food, for the first time. In Rally English and in Easy English with onomatopoeia. Accessibility with applied audio description (by Anu Aaltonen and Heikki Ekola) and experimental sound description (by Riitta Lahtinen and Russ Palmer).
Suomi-Väänänen works as a filmmaker and media artist. Praised as fascinating, absurd and open to a multitude of interpretations, Suomi-Väänänen’s award-winning works are shown in exhibitions, on TV, at biennales and festivals over 40 countries.
In Marja Viitahuhta’s The Inland Sea (2017), two personal stories related to parenthood and fear of loss of ones child at the sea, both based on real events. The first one describes an incident where the daughter of a Finnish woman nearly drowned on a holiday trip to a beach, the latter is based on the memories of a kurdish refugee who escaped war and ISIS attacks in her home country Iraq and ended up in a smuggler boat with her husband and young child.
Viitahuhta‘s works deconstruct individual identities, memories, or the idealised imagery of nations and landscapes. Her work often speaks in an intimate and personal tone and deals with existence and mortality.
Viitahuhta: The Inland Sea (2017)
Timo Wright’s Embrace (2016) portrays an abandoned house, furniture strewn around, discarded. Slowly, a red smoke starts to pour in through the doors. Eventually the whole house is engulfed with the smoke that hides everything from our sight.
Wright is a media artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Wright has graduated with MA degree from the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki in 2014. His films have been shown at over 40 festivals worldwide, including IDFA, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Slamdance and Japan Media Arts Festival.
Wright: Embrace (2016)
Jukka Silokunnas’s Vanishing Point (2017) is a short documentary of the time past.
“When I was a kid we used to traveler a lot with my family. I used to Iook the changing landscape through the caravan window. Only older I realized: I changed, not the landscape.”
Jukka Silokunnas makes videos and uses the urban environment as his living room. His works talk about time and space and movements around them that often remain unnoticed. Silokunnas has participated in solo and group exhibitions, festivals and events including Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia in Gdansk, Poland (2013), Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012) and Kunsthalle Helsinki (2011).
Stuttgarter Filmwinter, 8.–11.2.2018
More information: Stuttgarter Filmwinter