Midnight Sun: From Kiarostami to Kaurismäki
Seán Crosson reports from Finland’s Midnight Sun Film Festival (13–17 June 2007), a unique event that more closely resembles a school dance than a media-launched festival.

In its 22 years of existence, the Midnight Sun Film Festival has established a reputation as Finland’s most distinctive festival of cinema, providing an important opportunity for new and sometimes more challenging Finnish cinema to find an audience, as well as specializing in retrospectives on some of the most important practitioners of world cinema. This year’s subjects included Iran’s leading filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, directors Claude Goretta from Switzerland, Vittorio De Seta from Italy, Elia Suleiman from Palestine, and Amos Gitai from Israel, all of whom attended the festival and gave public interviews.

The festival’s distinctiveness is partly due to its taking place over four days uninterrupted by darkness – indeed films run through the night until 6am, with ‘musicals’ – including the special edition of Denis Sanders’s Elvis: That's the Way It Is (1970, reedited by Michael Salomon in 2001) and the Irish-produced Julian Temple documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007) – tending to dominate the small hours. The festival’s ‘Midnight Sun’ is due to its location in the Lapland town of Sodankylä, over 100 miles North of the Arctic Circle. It was founded by film historian and director Peter von Bagh along with directors Mika and his more famous younger brother Aki Kaurismäki, arguably Finland’s finest contemporary director. Aki’s latest short, Valimo (2007), was screened at the festival. Made as part of an episodic film celebrating the Cannes film festival, Valimo features Kaurismäki’s recognisable, distinctive characters and compositions, inspired by Finnish culture. As Abbas Kiarostami noted of Sodankylä, ‘Looking around me in this town, I realised I’d seen the place before – in Kaurismäki’s films’. Valimo cleverly incorporates Lumière brothers clips of women leaving a factory (in La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) watched by contemporary Finnish iron workers on their lunch break in a retro-styled Finnish cinema – not unlike Lappinsuu, the only purpose built cinema in Sodankylä.

Lapinsuu was accompanied by two other less orthodox screening venues in the town: a converted gym in the local high school and a circus tent which hosted the excellent nightly screenings of silent classics accompanied by live music. It is all part of the charm of the festival, which Bagh described as more closely resembling ‘a school dance than the popular (and media-launched) concept of a film festival’. This informal atmosphere was reflected in audiences, with directors from Kiarostami to Kaurismäki and local TV personalities alike sharing beers and pancakes in the small tent next to main venues and entertained with Finnish folkmusic provided by a local accordionist. The silent films featured this year included Vertov’s celebration of the fruits of the communist revolution Odinnadtsatyy (The Eleventh Year) (1928), which includes documentary footage of the building of the electric power plant over the River Dnepr. The film was accompanied by one of the most unlikely musical soundtracks, performed by the band Cleaning Women. Using mostly implements used in the cleaning process, including a drying rack for clothes, the musicians produced arguably one of the most unique soundscapes ever to accompany a silent film. The other two featured silents were the hilarious and death-defying Harold Loyld classic Safety Last! (1923), accompanied by the Prima Vista Social Club led by Neil Brand. Brand also gave a virtuoso solo accompaniment on piano for the final silent classic, King Vidor’s anti-war epic, The Big Parade (1925).

The festival also featured the Finnish premiere of Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). However, reactions among those who watched the film was somewhat mixed, with little commentary in the local media. The film wasn’t subtitled and, speaking to some of those who attended, it seems many found the strong Cork accents difficult to follow.
           
Of the Finnish films featured, the most impressive was Aleksi Salmenperä’s Miehen työ (A Man’s Work, 2007), the story of a recently laid off iron worker who, unable to tell his wife he’s lost his job, accidentally happens upon a lucrative, if ultimately self destructive career as a male prostitute, providing sexual and psychological support for older ladies. The unlikely premise is convincingly realised by the film’s director, aided in no small way by a powerful performance by Tommi Korpela as the central character, Juha. Other impressive new work at the festival included Lars von Trier’s Direktøren for det hele (The Boss of It All, 2007), a hilarious story of a company boss who hires an actor to play his fictitious superior, such is his fear of his employee’s reactions to the hard decisions he must occasionally make. The film was shot using the Autovision camera system Trier has employed in recent films, where an automatic and randomized camera chooses each shot featured. While this seemed occasionally superfluous and distracting, the narrative was sustained in particular by the powerful performance of Jens Albinus in the lead role of Kristoffer, a character reminiscent of ’Stoffer (also played by Albinus) in Trier’s Idioterne (The Idiots, 1998).

During his public interview (which will be covered in more detail in a future article in Film Ireland), Kiarostami commented on the importance of film festivals for independent world cinema. ‘I think that if there were no festivals,’ he remarked ‘many people would not have the opportunity to make films.’ On the evidence of a week spent in Sodankylä, the Midnight Sun film Festival continues to provide, in a remarkable setting, a crucial outlet for innovative and thought provoking cinema.

Midnight Sun Film Festival