Elokuvayhtiö Testifilmi

A film essay montage of contemporary footage, archive and cinema history, about the age of post-truth and how one young man’s childhood epilepsy became representative of the woes of the world and how he triumphed against adversity.

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.

Suddenly there is an enormous amount of time. At first everything is possible. Anything might happen. Gradually the possible becomes impossible.

From the wreckage of a buddy comedy rises something stranger: a story that fractures midway into an existential revenge thriller—burning forward with the inevitability of the sun’s passage across the sky.

Exploring geological epochs and kingdoms of life, Realms voyages through deep time from the primeval ocean to a post-human future. The film employs visual storytelling, seeking to replace the anthropocentric worldview with greater attention to the complex interrelationships and dependencies between organisms, and between animate and inanimate nature.

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.

The romantic landscape paintings often portrayed weather condition, topography of national landscape, religious themes, spirituality of nature and hunting scenes. Blue Honda Civic is a minimalistic road movie mirroring the emotions of the driver through the landscapes (s)he has chosen to look at.

In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.

Impivaara – A New World adapts Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi's novel Seven Brothers (1870) for the 21st Century. The emphasis is on the climate crisis, the energetic basis of our culture and the co-dependencies of human and more-than-human worlds.

A three-week vacation in the middle of a heatwave. Failed Emptiness is an existential thriller that describes the familiar experience of emptiness when responsibilities end.

Finnish engineer Eric Tigerstedt solved the dilemma of sound-on-film already before the First World War. All images and sounds in this short film are produced from the surviving test materials originally created in 1914.