Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic screened at VERZIÓ and Festival dei Popoli

Maija Blåfield’s The Fantastic (2020) continues its tour of festivals across Europe, having been selected for VERZIÓ International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Hungary and Festival dei Popoli in Italy.

At VERZIÓ, the film is part of the Archive of the planet -programme. VERZIÓ International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival is held online November 10 – 22. Festival dei Popoli is also held online, from November 15 – 22.

The Fantastic is a film about encountering the unknown and the relationship between imagination and reality. The film is built on interviews with exiled North Koreans, who describe what they imagined the outside world to be like, based on their experiences of watching smuggled western fiction films. Alternating documentary footage and visual effects, the film raises the question of how reality is defined and what we wish to believe in. The Fantastic reverses the set-up where westerners are peeping in on the everyday life of the closed-off state. In this film, it is the North Koreans who direct their curiosity at the outside world and imagine what life in Western countries is like.

Maija Blåfield is an artist and an experimental documentary filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. Her works often combine documentary and fiction in some way, exploring the fantastic side of our everyday life and digging up the stories from its events. She was granted the State Prize for the Media Arts in 2014 and in 2017, she was a nominee for Ars Fennica award for contemporary art. Her works have been screened in internatonal and national festivals, television, art museums and exhibitions.


VERZIÓ International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, 10 – 22 November 2020, Hungary

Festival dei Popoli, 15 – 22 November 2020, Italy


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.