Some things do not change over the years: the cheerful chatter on the Kitisenranta School yard and the growing queues on the first day of the festival! This year the festival goers were also greeted by bright sunshine and a gentle summer breeze.
Already before noon, the festival opened with James Gray’s Armageddon Time, a coming-of-age story in which an art loving boy who is not too keen on school has to face his family’s traumas and the injustice of the society. At the School a little later, started the screening of Zhang Lu’s painful but tender and lightly comedic story The Shadowless Tower.
Olaf Möller, a familiar face in Sodankylä, has curated a Master Class series on Croatian films from the 60s that started in the late afternoon with the film A Train Without a Timetable. In his presentation Möller praised the film highly: “Your life is not worth living if you have not seen this film!” Möller’s Master Class series will continue with several other films: On Thursday at Cinema Kitinen we will see Nikola Tanhofer’s “philosophical fairytale” Happiness Comes at Nine o’Clock and tomorrow on Friday Marijan Vajda’s Seki’s Rolling, Watch Out! On Saturday at Cinema Kitinen Vatroslav Mimica’s Monday or Tuesday will be screened, and on Sunday at the School we get to see Zvonimir Berković’s Roundabout.
In the afternoon, Lapinsuu Cinema was filled with public for the Finnish premiere of Hanna Västinsalo’s Palimpsest that won acclaim at the Venice Film Festival. The director was present along with the producer Cyril Jacob Abraham, cinematographer Henry Dhuy, and the actors Leo Sjöman and Emma Kilpimaa.
In the evening, the opening film filled Lapinsuu Cinema again. In his opening speech the Artistic Director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival Timo Malmi praised the Risto Jarva association’s new grant for film writers. In addition, Malmi presented this year’s festival’s architecture special.
Architecture plays an important part also in the opening film The Castle of Purity by Arturo Ripstein. Unfortunately, Ripstein could not attend in person, but he greeted the audience via video.
As the night approached, also the Ukrainian documentarist Sergei Loznitsa came to Lapinsuu Cinema to present his film The Natural History of Destruction. The film compiled from the archive material of World War II shows the industrial scale bombardments of German cities and questions this type of warfare aimed at terrorising and destroying civilians that continues even today.
At the same time, French Emmanuel Mouret’s romantic, light-hearted, and timeless Diary of a Fleeting Affair was screened at the School. After the film Mouret told the audience about the relationship between the original script and the final version of the film and how a building designed by Alvar Aalto ended up in the film. The first night at Cinema Kitinen ended in Kim Hopkins’ A Bunch of Amateurs. In the cooling night the audience laughed affectionately at the tiny filmmaking club from Northern England with a long tradition but few members fighting to keep up its activities and make its own short but ambitious home movies.
The first day contained international gems, new Finnish films, comments on social issues, and light-hearted romantic films. This is an excellent start for the celebration of the midnight sun!
Image: Sami Sorasalmi