Although there are hundreds if not thousands of film festivals in the world, Peter von Bagh’s documentary about the first 25 years of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, with its focus on the words of the guest directors, is a rare if not unique piece of work in its genre. There is hardly any other film in which such an extensive group of filmmakers talk about their lives and careers: from Samuel Fuller to Francis Ford Coppola and from Ettore Scola to Chantal Akerman. Since the very beginning of the festival Peter von Bagh has invited the main guests to talk about their work in two-hour morning discussions, and the result has been compared to something we might hear at a confessional or on a psychoanalyst’s couch. The spectrum of discussions ranges from the guests’ nostalgy for the very first film that they’ve seen to the films they would like to take with them to a desert island. The documentary’s “montage of wisdom” directs the dialogue to the century of cinema history as well as the hidden connections and emotions and their development through time as it is captured on film.
The documentary offers a kind of heavenly dialogue (many of the talkers have already left us, including Peter von Bagh himself) between film light and the midnight sun. The conversations combined with flashes from festival screenings, the village road, and the most flourishing mid-June Lapland landscape prove that the Midnight Sun Film Festival is a great adventure of the seventh art, the magic of which Peter von Bagh has managed to capture in his documentary with the passion of an avowed cinephile.
The screening will include only the fourth and final episode of the documentary.
Timo Malmi