Jan Ijäs

Samuel Beckett made a single work for projected cinema. The film ‘Film’ was shot in New York in the summer of 1964. Beckett needed one street scene for the opening of the film, and he wanted that street image to be shot in a street that he described as ”absolute street”.

The documentary takes the viewer on a serene afternoon stroll through the Japanese mental landscape and culture, with death and ageing as its perspectives.

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

Two Islands – Staten Island & Hart Island, NYC is a film about two enormous waste dumps in NYC. The first one is now closed, an ordinary waste dump, which at one point was the largest in the world. The other is a cemetery of unknowns, still in use.

In 2018 the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, referred to in the film as Mr. K, captured the world’s attention as little by little, snippets of his fate became public. What started out as a mysterious disappearance at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, slowly spiraled into an elaborate web of lies, and ultimately, a horrific murder. The news was particularly disturbing as it seemingly happened at the behest of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, prompting many world leaders to step into the ring and voice their condemnation, including the US president, “Mr. T”.

Le radeau de la Méduse parallels the wrecked boats of the African immigrants on the Italian Lampedusa island and the abandoned cars of asylum seekers that have traveled from Russia to Salla, Finnish Lapland with Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), located in Louvre. Based on true events, the subject of the painting is the 1816 shipwreck of Méduse, a frigate with administrative personnel on their way from France to African colonies. The passengers of the ship rescued on a raft they built and left drifting on the open sea with fatal consequences.

What if waste suddenly became huge? When we discover that underneath an orthodox church (in Helsinki) there is a world data server, which uses recycled water to cool itself, we confirm that nothing is what it seems. From here we start a trip around the world, passing through South Korea, Ghana and Turkey. The constant exclamation “How Great” becomes part of our lexicon, to amaze us, always. The world seen through the evocation of waste can only make the world alert. Come back Greta!

this film revisits the history of the City in twenty minutes through twelve cemeteries and one landfill. The short documentary is the fourth, independent episode from the ten-part Waste series. 

Before sliding into the uniform of his father, the dictator and founder of the “Republic” of North Korea, Kim Jong II was passionate about film. He was said to have a collection of 20,000 videos, with a predilection for action films… from the West of course. One-time director of Arts and Humanities at the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, he wrote in the 1970s an essay on the theoretical practice of how the 7th art should express the ideology in place. Jan Iljäs drew inspiration from the clear principles of the “Shining Star” to create a short film composed of shots taken during a touristic trip to the country.

House of the Wickedest Man in the World is the story of a ruined building near the city of Cefalú in Sicily. In the early 1920s, Aleister Crowley, the most famous occultist of his time, lived in the building, practicing magical rituals. In the summer of 1955, Kenneth Anger, considered one of the pioneers of experimental cinema, traveled with sexologist Alfred Kinsey to Sicily to find Aleister Crowley’s temple to shoot a film about the occultist’s time in Cefalú. The Thelema Abbey film was never released.

Wreck (Lampedusa, Italy, 2015) was filmed in 2014 and 2015 in the graveyard for refugee boats on the Italian island of Lampedusa. It is a story about how the value of garbage and rubbish can surprisingly change.