At the 41st film festival, taking place on 10–14 June, audiences will travel from the ruins of a Chinese film studio to a Chadian village, and from the Bronx to the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Finnish films visit the landscapes of the national epic, a couple’s retreat and the world of military service.
The Midnight Sun Film Festival New Cinema Gems series presents fresh precision strikes from the world of cinematic art. The programme includes works by beloved masters of the medium – Ildikó Enyedi, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Sergei Loznitsa, Ross McElwee, Christian Petzold and Kelly Reichardt – but also features debuts that have made waves internationally.
Hungarian filmmaker Enyedi, who visited The Festival in 2022, returns with her modern masterpiece Silent Friend, weaving together three stories witnessed by the ancient ginkgo tree standing in the botanical gardens of the University of Marburg. The film also features the first English-language role for the sensitive-eyed Tony Leung. Haroun, from Chad, visited Sodankylä in 2018. This year, we will see his magical-realist feminist fable Soumsoum, The Night of the Stars, which tells the story of a 17-year-old girl shunned by her village community and forms an alliance with a forty-year-old woman believed to be a witch. As for Loznitsa, his oeuvre is represented by the masterfully laconic Two Prosecutors, a portrait of Soviet tyranny in the 1930s whose nightmarish atmosphere resonates with Russia’s Kafkaesque present day.
American documentarian Ross McElwee’s exceptionally moving family portrait Remake poses fundamental questions about the morality and meaning of documenting the lives of those closest to us. At the centre of the film is McElwee’s son, who died as a result of drug use. A family in crisis also lies at the heart of Mirrors No. 3, the latest drama by German director Christian Petzold, one of the leading figures of contemporary European cinema and a guest in Sodankylä in 2015. In the film, a family takes in a woman who has survived a car accident but lost her boyfriend in the tragedy. She is played by Petzold regular Paula Beer. An altogether more adrift family appears in The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt, the quiet visionary of contemporary cinema. Here, a husband and father secretly embarks on a career as an art thief – despite having absolutely none of the qualifications for the job.
The Festival will also present two Canadian–Eastern European films from the early stages of their directors’ careers. Sophy Romvari’s fresh and critically acclaimed debut feature Blue Heron explores memory and remembrance through beautiful imagery and the struggles of an émigré family. Meanwhile, Nina Roza is the second feature by Geneviève Dulude-De Celles. Set within the art world, the film weighs questions of identity, language and morality, and received the award for Best Screenplay at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi, Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr. and Swiss director Marie-Elsa Sgualdo each dive into the political histories of their home countries from different perspectives. In Narciso, Martinessi portrays his country caught under military dictatorship in 1959, yet links Paraguay’s “new normal” to the arrival of rock ’n’ roll and a gripping murder mystery. With his acclaimed debut feature My Father’s Shadow, Davies Jr. takes audiences to 1993 and the day of Nigeria’s presidential election. Drawing on a child’s perspective and the writer-director’s own memories of his politically active father, the film offers a personal view of a pivotal moment. Sgualdo’s Silent Rebellion, beginning in 1943, follows a maid working for a Swiss clerical family as she awakens to social reality: both to her own position as a working-class woman and to the indifference of fellow villagers in the face of Nazi ideology. The film’s social critique also strikes at the present day.
Czech director Ondřej Provazník loosely bases Broken Voices on a case that shook his country’s recent history, when the leader of a Prague girls’ choir was sentenced to prison for sexual abuse. Yet this delicately tuned drama does not rely on outrage; instead, it follows the coming-of-age story of a preteen girl as the enchantment of teenage years gradually gives way to sorrow. Questions surrounding sexual violence also surface in American director Lance Hammer’s drama Queen at Sea, whose leading role was written specifically for French star Juliette Binoche. Binoche plays a daughter who discovers her mother suffering from advanced dementia in bed with her stepfather, questions her capacity to consent, and calls the police. The film’s uncompromising moral vision was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, where veteran actors Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall were also recognised for their heart-rending performances.
Other world-class stars will also grace Sodankylä’s cinema screens, as American director Kent Jones’s Late Fame is led by Willem Dafoe, who has enjoyed the admiration of both critics and audiences for decades, while his co-star Greta Lee is currently on a remarkable rise. Warm and generous in spirit, the film takes viewers into New York’s cool art circles – both old-school and new. The lighter side of the New Cinema Gems series is represented by two debut features: Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay and Xú Zǎo’s Light Pillar. The former is a vivid slice-of-life portrait of Rico, a carefree 19-year-old from the Bronx whose easy-going existence veers into chaos when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. Meanwhile, the animation Light Pillar unfolds in a kind of graveyard of dreams: the abandoned sets of an old film studio, where a lonely caretaker drifts through the remnants of a bygone era of filmmaking.
As always, the programme also features a selection of the finest new Finnish films. In Father’s Day, tensions emerge both from social structures and from fragile hopes tied to family relationships. Elsewhere, the storm of progress threatens reality itself (E), the wild challenges tightly controlled humanity (The Squirrel), and music alternately threatens to suffocate and liberate a musician (A Light That Never Goes Out). Other films see couples turn against one another (Therapy), children go to battle with otters (Ella and Friends – Operation Otter), and an artist fights for her independence (Happy Sassy Beautiful). Men, meanwhile, measure themselves against one another armed with our national epic (Kalevala: The Story of Kullervo) and their own understated perseverance (Sisu: Road to Revenge).
Most of the Finnish short films screening at the festival will receive their Finnish premieres. Pia Andell will attend with her latest film Let’s Not Ruin the Party by Talking About Death. Its Chekhovian summer-villa setting is overshadowed by one character’s approaching death. Mari Mantela will also bring her newly completed After Ego, in which a forest landscape transforms into the stage for a border war. Jan Ijäs’s documentary PICNIC – In Light Invisible to the Human Eye confronts a very real war, presenting picnic spots where people gather to watch the bombing of Gaza. In Teemu Nikki’s premiere Placeholder, the protagonist offers his services as a kind of rehearsal partner for human relationships, a placeholder. Arriving almost directly from the Cannes Film Festival is the premiere screening of TJ28 and its director Yasmin Najjar. Based on her own experiences in the military, the film was selected for Cannes’ La Cinef section from among thousands of submissions. Finnish short films are also represented by Risto-Pekka Blom’s Too Blue a Sky, which earlier this year won the Grand Prix for films under 30 minutes at the Tampere Film Festival.
The Midnight Sun Film Festival takes place from 10–14 June, from Wednesday morning through to Sunday evening. More information on festival guests, Masterclasses and silent film screenings can be found in earlier press releases. The festival schedule will be published on Monday, 25 May, when festival passes will also go on sale. Advance online ticket sales for individual screenings begin on Wednesday, 27 May.
Midnight Sun Film Festival would like to thank its co-operation partners:
Sodankylä Municipality, Finnish Film Foundation, Trade Union Pro, Kemijoki Oy, Ministry of Education and Culture, Genelec, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas Oy, EU Media Creative, Tähtikuitu Oy, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, Goethe-Institut Finnland, Institut Français de Finlande, The Nordic Culture Fund, The Finnish Arts and Culture Agency (Kuvi), Finland Festivals Association and Yle.