Azar Saiyar’s Laila’s Apple and Sami van Ingen’s Flame screened at Suspaustaus Laikas experimental film festival, Vilnius

Azar Saiyar’s Laila’s Apple (2021, in featured image) and Sami van Ingen’s Flame (2018) will be screened in an experimental film screening “The Archival Impulse” at Suspaustas Laikas experimental film festival, taking place in the MO Museum of Vilnius, Lithuania, on Wednesday, July 27 2022, at 19.00.

Composed of archive footage and interviews, Laila’s Apple is a video work about childhood, growing up, learning and rules.

Azar Saiyar is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards ways of looking, remembering and storytelling. Her films have been screened at international film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums and broadcast on television.

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.

Sami van Ingen is a veteran in alternative Finnish film, who has worked as an artist, lecturer and curator since the late 1980s. He lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Van Ingen finished his doctoral studies in the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2012. He often uses random or found materials in his works. His works have been seen in many national and international exhibitions and festivals over the years, including Tbilisi Triennial (2012), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2005) and Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland (2002).

Sami van Ingen: Flame (2018)

The Archival Impulse, July 27 2022, Suspaustas Laikas, MO Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania

More information: Suspaustas Laikas


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.