Marja Viitahuhta & Ánnámáret, Ilkka Heinonen and Turkka Inkilä‘s Vuoiŋŋat (Spirits) (featured image) and Charlotte Clermont‘s du soleil, que ça existe have been selected to compete in the Fascinations section at the 29th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, held from October 10–November 2, 2025 in Jihlava, Czech Republic.
Fascinations is a prestigious competition section for best world experimental documentary films.
In Vuoiŋŋat (Spirits), a camera-less video work, digitally animated northern lights intertwine with a luohti — a Northern Sámi joik — performed by Sámi musician Ánnámáret. The joik tells of homeless, wandering spirits. The piece is dedicated to the memory of the Sámi whose remains were exhumed from cemeteries across Sápmi around 100–150 years ago in the name of racist scientific research. Some of these remains were only recently reburied, in 2022, in the regions of Inari, Utsjoki, and Nellim.
The animation’s imagery — landscapes that alternately dissolve and clarify — is created by digitally manipulating drawings made in 1839 by French illustrator Louis Bévalet, who documented the northern lights during an expedition to the Alta region. His illustrations now find new life in this work.
Ánnámáret’s joik is accompanied by Ilkka Heinonen on the jouhikko (a traditional bowed lyre) and Turkka Inkilä’s electronic music. The work is part of a long-term collaboration by a four-member artistic team, which has produced a series of video pieces, two music albums, and performs together at concerts and festivals.
Charlotte Clermont’s du soleil, que ça existe examines the temporalities through which the body forms, stores, and creates what we translate as the real. Focusing on longing, distance, and language, this text-based project explores the expansiveness of both language and landscape, by installing spaciousness in the dialogue and by considering landscapes as bodies.
Because of veils that obscure or illuminate the images, the inability to perceive is experienced at times in almost-erased spaces, at others in velvety dark spaces, where only details are revealed through the flickering of the film’s solarization. The rhythm between light and darkness echoes the movements of the sea, adding aqueous and sensuous layers to the film, where images seem to exist outside of the often narrative space of cinema, becoming instead paintings or photographs in motion.
The overall feeling of this short film is inspired by Marguerite Duras’ The Malady of Death (trans. 1986) in which she describes, at the end of the book, how a window overlooking a dark sea at night becomes an element central to her work.
Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Oct 24–Nov 2, 2025
Jihlava, Czech Republic
More information: Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
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!