This year, the motifs of the Night School revolve around the mundane and the horrific: cinema as food and light as the source of life and energy.
Sources documents the production of vegetable pate under the Mediterranean sun, by the banks of the Aude river. Rose Lowder depicts the process with the same degree of tenderness as Thomas the Gardener handles the raw materials gathered from his garden.
Revolving Rounds is the best film about peas you’ve never seen. Johann Lurf’s and Christina Jauernik’s mysterious film begins and ends in a greenhouse bathed in the morning sun. As darkness falls, strange kinetic rituals juxtapose modern intensive farming with watching film.
Ville Koskinen’s Hampaat (Teeth) is an urban horror story beyond sunlight. The mechanical teeth of a subway escalator endlessly grinds passengers. The film portrays a piece of Helsinki infrastructure as a rite of passage into the afterlife. In the mechanical room, its maintenance crew are on their lunch break. The latest choreographic arrangement of Helena Wittmann and sound artist Nika Son A Thousand Waves Away immerses the viewer in a warm bath of electronic pulse. Lost wanderers in a garden. A shock sends them running. Blinding sunlight. Confusion spreads.
Tina Frank’s Pliii plays with artificial light. The final sizzles of a dying LED Genie’s Lamp captured using a mobile phone creates a source of fizzing image and static sound.
Being John Smith is a harrowing tale of a life lived under the shadow of a mundane name given in a rush. Meanings and misunderstandings are woven together with a healthy dose of self-irony. This contemplative biography of a pioneer of avant-garde film is a cosmic entanglement of occurrences without an ounce of pathos.
Mika Taanila
Screening duration: 68 min
Curated by: Mika Taanila
With thanks to: Gerald Weber / Sixpackfilm, Mariya Nikiforova & Miguel Armas / Light Cone
MOVIES
Sources (France, 2012)
Revolving Rounds (Austria, 2024)
Hampaat/Teeth (Finland, 2024)
A Thousand Waves Away (Germany, 2025)
Pliii (Austria, 2021)
Being John Smith (United Kingdom, 2024)