Risto-Pekka Blom: Too Blue a Sky (Finland, 2026, 16 min)
Risto-Pekka Blom’s award-winning short films have been screened at several editions of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, both in our short film screenings and Sunday’s Leffaraati (Short Film Jury). In his films, Blom often takes a discreetly humorous look at seemingly minor subjects that grow into more universal allegories.
Too Blue a Sky focuses on a 164-year-old freshwater pearl mussel, whose lifespan covers several events considered revolutionary to humankind. The emergence and collapse of dictatorships and rumours of apocalypse do little to sway the mussel’s peaceful existence in their home river, until the greed of humans finally proves fatal.
Is life unaffected by human follies any less valuable? And what is left on our Earth, when the billionaires nonchalantly exploiting and destroying it are in their graves? Too Blue a Sky won its director the Main Prize in Tampere Film Festival National Competition’s under 30-minute category, already his third.
Original name: Liian sininen taivas. Language: Finnish, subtitles in English
Jan Ijäs: Picnic – In Light Invisible to the Human Eye (Finland, 2026, 26 min)
Imagine if our Finnish war memorials were still sites of active killing while tourists watched? This is the reality along the Israel-Gaza border.
Award-winning filmmaker Jan Ijäs is known for his Waste film series, ambitiously tackling the concept of refuse from various angles. In Picnic, Ijäs continues on a politically observant mode, this time focusing on the genocide in Gaza. In footage shot in September 2025, we visit tourist destinations and look-out points located in the border region, where people travel to marvel at the view overlooking Gaza. The narrator recounts real-life online reviews by the travellers.
Shot on IR-sensitive film, the horrors of war are but distant puffs of smoke on the horizon. Still, the grotesqueness of the human condition becomes all the more evident by the privileged tourists complaining about such things as noise or smells emanating from the plight of the otherized people, impacting their picnic. The score by Timo Kaukolampi completes the bone-chilling atmosphere.
Language: English, subtitles in Finnish
Yasmin Najjar: 28 Days Left (Finland, 2026, 24 min)
Midnight Sun Film Festival has often had the pleasure of freshly presenting Finland’s representatives at the Cannes Film Festival on our silver screen. This is also the case now, as we get to see the short drama 28 Days Left, directed by and starring Yasmin Najjar. This poignant reflection of militarism and diaspora was selected to Cannes’ La Cinef competition out of thousands of submissions.
Based on the director’s own experiences in the Finnish army, Amani (Najjar) is nearing the end of her voluntary service, when she receives worrying news about her grandfather in Gaza. Amani keeps trying to focus on the task at hand, but the mainly cavalier attitudes of her squad mates towards combat exercise and other living beings hit home differently when a loved one is far away facing the worst.
The director’s own childhood home videos combined with Nadia Farghaly’s stunning forest cinematography bring the painful point home without unnecessary pathos. When the Aalto University’s Department of Film is providing such fresh talent to our film industry, it is a crying shame if we can’t get them funding.
Original name: TJ28. Language: Finnish, Arabic, subtitles in English
Liina Härkönen
Duration 66 min.