The focus of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, to be held in Sodankylä from June 11 to 15, will be on celebration this year: the Festival is turning 40 and the art of cinema 130. Collaboration with three renowned European festivals guarantees that gems of film history will be screened in Sodankylä.
The Lumière brothers held the first public motion picture screening in France in 1895. This gave birth to cinema as we know it. One of its key elements has always been the shared experience and space. At the end of the following century, ninety years after the Lumière brothers, the Kaurismäki brothers, Aki and Mika, and Anssi Mänttäri founded their own communal film event. The first Midnight Sun Film Festival was held a year later.
The celebration runs through the entire event this year, but a special series entitled 40 Years of Midnight Sun Film Festival – 130 Years of Cinema has also been curated for the Festival in its honour. It will delight audiences with gems from the festival founders’ repertoire and films that explore the history of cinema and its foundations. Aki Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union (1985), Mika Kaurismäki’s Rosso (1985), and Anssi Mänttäri’s Katya’s Autumn (Muuttolinnun aika, 1991) are all films made around the time the Festival was founded and have stood the test of time and gained renown just like the whole event itself.
The event’s reputation will be underscored by festival powerhouse Peter von Bagh’s documentary Sodankylä Forever (Sodankylä ikuisesti, 2010), which captures morning discussions with the main guests during the Festival’s first twenty-five years. We will screen the final part of the documentary series, Drama of Light (Valon draama, 2010), the title already encapsulating the magic of Sodankylä: the light projected onto the screen meets its counterpart in the midnight sun. The exoticism of the North is given a turbocharge in Antonio Colantuoni’s controversial documentary Mondo Finlandia (Dove non è peccato, 1970), which takes elements of the official image of Finland – reindeer, saunas, and nature – and turns them into a sensational film. Surprisingly, the common thread linking this film to Sodankylä Forever is Peter von Bagh, who gets to speak in this exploitation-leaning mondo documentary.
The series 40 Years of the Midnight Sun Film Festival – 130 Years of Cinema also screens in Sodankylä the French director Arnaud Desplechin’s Filmlovers!, a personal love letter to cinema. Sami van Ingen’s Cast of Shadows (2024) explores the legacy of the director’s great-grandfather, documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, and his family. Jacques Demy’s beloved The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964) reminds us of the power of the seventh art, where sweet colour composition and constant singing may be paired with the realism of war.
The Midnight Sun Film Festival has become a concept in both the domestic and international world of cinema. The Festival’s guests have included some of the world’s greatest filmmakers, visionaries, and innovators of the art from Agnès Varda to Francis Ford Coppola, Chantal Akerman to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Michael Powell to Samira Makhmalbaf. This year’s international guests also include names that have cemented their place in cinema history. Margarethe von Trotta has been one of the world’s leading feminist filmmakers since the 1970s. That same decade also saw the start of the careers of cult figure Chris Petit, known for his essayistic films, and Julien Temple, who vaulted to universal fame riding the punk rock wave. Having made her debut in a film directed by Robert Bresson in the previous decade, Dominique Sanda starred in films directed by the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci, Vittorio De Sica, John Frankenheimer, and Mauro Bolognini, among others, in the 1970s.
From that decade, the year 1975 is particularly well represented in Sodankylä. The program, created in collaboration with three renowned European film festivals—Summer Film School (Czech Republic), FEMA La Rochelle (France), and Bergamo Film Meeting (Italy)—consists of five landmark films from that year. One of them is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, co-directed by this year’s guest, von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, which depicts the West German moral panic in a striking way that resonates even today. The series also includes The Romantic Englishwoman by American-British director Joseph Losey, A Woman’s Decision (aka The Quarterly Balance, Bilans kwartalny) by Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, The Passenger (Professione: reporter) by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, and Wives (Hustruer) by Norwegian director Anja Breien. Celebrating their 50th anniversary, these films bring complex character studies and intricate human relations dynamics to the screen, all with the uncompromising touch of their creators.
The Festival’s film programme is curated by its Artistic Committee, which consists of Aki and Mika Kaurismäki and Artistic Director Timo Malmi.
The Festival programme will be published on Friday, May 23. The festival programme schedule will be published on Monday, May 26, and series tickets will go on sale on the same day. Advance ticket sales will start online on Wednesday, May 28, at 12 noon.
The Midnight Sun Film Festival thanks its partners:
Trade Union Pro, Finland Festivals Association, EU Creative Media, Genelec, Goethe-Institut Finnland, Kemijoki Oy, Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas Oy, National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI), Finnish Film Foundation (SES), Sodankylä Municipality, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), Tähtikuitu Oy, YLE Teema