The Midnight Sun Film Festival is turning 40, and festivities will take place around the clock from the 11th to the 15th of June.
The composer and musician Anssi Tikanmäki (1955-2024) has a special place in the very core of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, and hence will be the honored composer of the music of the silent film concerts. Tikanmäki’s pioneering work as a film composer was recognized with the first ever Sodankylä prize in 1988. He composed scores for every founding member of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, including The Worthless (1982) by Mika Kaurismäki, Juha (1999) by Aki Kaurismäki, and Kuningas lähtee Ranskaan (1986) by Anssi Mänttäri. Led by Tikanmäki himself, the Anssi Tikanmäki Film Orchestra composed and performed the scores to accompany the very first five silent film screenings in Sodankylä, besides many that followed. In the present day, according to their father’s wish, Eljas and Eemil Tikanmäki run the orchestra.
This year, the Anssi Tikanmäki Film Orchestra will accompany F.W. Murnau’s and Erich von Stroheim’s silent film masterpieces The Last Laugh (1924) and Greed (1924). Murnau is already much loved and well known in Sodankylä from his work, such as the lauded film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). The Last Laugh is equally considered a milestone of German cinema.
Murnau’s film tells the story of a prestigious hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) demoted to a washroom attendant. The doorman is stripped from his dignity along with the uniform. The screenwriter Carl Mayer pulls off an impressive twist of narrative as the events proceed to an unexpected turning point. Correspondingly, Mayer was named as the “greatest scenarist of the 1920s” by Peter von Bagh, the co-founder and director of the first decades of the Midnight Sun Film Festival. However, the Last Laugh’s position as one of the great established works of film is secured by Karl Freund’s spectacular cinematography. Freund explores the camera’s role as the tool of focalisation, as the camera sets into the perspective and whirligig of the humiliated protagonist’s consciousness.
Greed will not leave it’s audience cold either. Within the course of the film production, the image of von Stroheim as a rigid director, already known from his brutalist visions, grew into legendary proportions. Von Stroheim insisted on filming in the harsh milieu of the Dead Valley, surrounded by incandescent heat. The film developed from a romance of a couple, played by Gibson Gowland and ZaSu Pitts, into a realistic depiction of torture and torment under the glaring sun. Greed is only so far from love. The screenplay is based on Frank Norris’ novel McTeague (1899), which depicts a real-life murder. Rumours hint that von Stroheim filmed inside the very same house in which the horrifying events took place. Against von Stroheim’s will the film was cut first from nine hours into four, and from there to the current length of 140 minutes. Even as a shortened version Greed is a major work of realism.
In the summer of 2025, the sunbeams and shadows of human life will be projected onto the silver screens of the Midnight Sun Film Festival for the 40th year in a row. In the traditional, much loved and awaited silent film screenings the films are accompanied by illustrious soundscapes and the undeniable masters of film music; Could there be any better way to celebrate the anniversary year?
The complete program and special guests will be announced in May, 2025. As the custom goes, the Midnight Sun Film Festival will be held from Wednesday forenoon to late Sunday night. The program map will be made public on Monday 26th of May. Sales of the serial film cards begin the same day. Individual ticket sales open online on Wednesday 28th of May.
Midnight Sun Film Festival would like to thank its partners:
Sodankylä Municipality, Finnish Film Foundation (SES), Ammattiliitto Pro ry, EU/Creative Media, Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas, Finnish Cultural Foundation, The Ministry of Education and Culture (OKM), The National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI), Taike, Yle Teema, Tähtikuitu Oy, Finland Festivals ry