Directing

Matti Harju

Matti HARJU studied MA in Directing Fiction at the NFTS (UK) and received an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. His film school shorts and self-produced films have been presented at international festivals including Locarno, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Clermont-Ferrand, BFI London, AFI Fest Los Angeles, Doclisboa, Edinburgh, New Horizons, Videoex, 25FPS and Torino.

Known For

Nox

MovieComedyThriller

From the wreckage of a buddy comedy rises something stranger: a story that fractures midway into an existential revenge thriller—burning forward with the inevitability of the sun’s passage across the sky.

Man Seeking Man

Man Seeking Man · 2004

Man Seeking Man

Fifty-year-old Seppo puts a contact ad in the newspaper. After many years, his son decides to look him up, just on the day that Seppo has a date. Sober and painful yet moving drama about loneliness and family bonds. - IFFR Duration: 12m Colour, Stereo Original format: Super 16mm film

Natura

MovieDramaThriller

An unsettling mystery about desperation and class divisions in the age of digital capitalism.

Yaris, Crow

Yaris, Crow · 2026

A slow loss of grip on reality: the search for «objectivity» at the fringes of a society consumed by technology. The film mixes original 16mm, Super 8, analog video and digital material with one AI-generated image transferred to 16mm film stock.

New Age

New Age · 2018

In the cold northern light, the hours and the days of two friends, the mechanisms of daily life and the expectations of a decadent reality which reveals itself in the dawns and sunsets, in the nights spent drinking and the groggy mornings-after. The Finnish artist Matti Harju offers himself in this self-portrait of (his) life, perhaps involuntarily placid and sweet.

Minus World

Minus World · 2021

Nintendo game, codeine and online bdsm all blend in this minimalistic speculation circling and edging towards a new view of otherness within.

El centro

El centro · 2021

Young Anon discovers the digital root of everything during a school trip to New York and comes to a surprising conclusion.

Aliens

A film about how language, be it film, art or written language, creates in itself a system where separation precedes contact.

Filmography

Sort

Nox

MovieComedyThriller

From the wreckage of a buddy comedy rises something stranger: a story that fractures midway into an existential revenge thriller—burning forward with the inevitability of the sun’s passage across the sky.

Director

Man Seeking Man

Man Seeking Man · 2004

Man Seeking Man

Fifty-year-old Seppo puts a contact ad in the newspaper. After many years, his son decides to look him up, just on the day that Seppo has a date. Sober and painful yet moving drama about loneliness and family bonds. - IFFR Duration: 12m Colour, Stereo Original format: Super 16mm film

Director

Natura

MovieDramaThriller

An unsettling mystery about desperation and class divisions in the age of digital capitalism.

Editor

Yaris, Crow

Yaris, Crow · 2026

A slow loss of grip on reality: the search for «objectivity» at the fringes of a society consumed by technology. The film mixes original 16mm, Super 8, analog video and digital material with one AI-generated image transferred to 16mm film stock.

Director

New Age

New Age · 2018

In the cold northern light, the hours and the days of two friends, the mechanisms of daily life and the expectations of a decadent reality which reveals itself in the dawns and sunsets, in the nights spent drinking and the groggy mornings-after. The Finnish artist Matti Harju offers himself in this self-portrait of (his) life, perhaps involuntarily placid and sweet.

Director

Minus World

Minus World · 2021

Nintendo game, codeine and online bdsm all blend in this minimalistic speculation circling and edging towards a new view of otherness within.

Director

El centro

El centro · 2021

Young Anon discovers the digital root of everything during a school trip to New York and comes to a surprising conclusion.

Director

Aliens

A film about how language, be it film, art or written language, creates in itself a system where separation precedes contact.

Director

Born to Feel

Born to Feel · 2022

Rumination about free will and the nature of feelings in the midst of tumblr aesthetics from the early 2010s. All video and audio material is either from unfinished projects or surplus material from completed ones. The text is partly autobiographical, partly fiction.

Director

One in Four

One in Four · 2008

Haunted by his involvement in a suicide, train driver Sion struggles to comprehend the consequences somebody else's decision could have on his own life.

Director

Three Days of Rain

Three Days of Rain · 2022

Three Days of Rain

Part time Twitch streamer, part time drug courier; both low level. Slithering between life and death, online and offline. The carefree summer of global progress seems to be over - are these the final days of both, the illusion of overarching narrative, and of Jerome the Saint.

Director

Afrikka

Afrikka · 2011

Young Finnish filmmaker Harju's disturbing, raw film gets up close to a psychotic man. We don't all live in the same reality. Nerve-wracking and frayed experimental fiction that shows a psychotic man and his direct surroundings in a totally uncompromising way. 'Our interaction with others is based on the idea that we all share the same reality. That turns out not always to be the case.'

Director