Failed Emptiness

The Helsinki of the 1990s, longed for by many, comes to life in Heikki Ahola's City Symphony. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, this classic montage film offers a unique glimpse into the pulsating life of the capital at all hours of the day. More than 30 young filmmakers worked on the documentary. Filmed between September 1993 and February 1995, City Symphony encounters the contrasting spirits of Helsinki – including unemployment and luxury, homeliness and internationalism. As the title suggests, music plays a central role in the film, with Tuomas Kantelinen responsible for the score. You won't find a more comprehensive journey through 1990s Helsinki than Kaupunkisinfonia. The world just before the breakthrough of the internet and the economic boom already looks very different.

A portrait of a small-town that is the unlikely site of a 'renaissance' of 'safe' nuclear energy started in 2004, a project that soon spiraled out of control.

A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.

A documentary film about Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941), whose career represents a surprisingly natural blend of music, film, computers, robotics, science and art.

In a bold and original approach to memory, this Lettrist-inspired film maps an anxiety-ridden plane journey from Tokyo to Helsinki without the aid of photographic images. A variety of interventions on the film strip are combined with an atmospheric sound design to create a subjective story of displacement and containment. In an age when experience is increasingly mediated through digital technologies, Taanila seeks out an alternative language in the sensuous surfaces of the celluloid material.

A journey through time to our futuristic recent past. A documentary film about the rise and fall of a Finnish plastic house. A story about the utopia of the "space age" that almost came true. The Futuro house was completed in 1968. It was believed that humanity was on the threshold of a new era, when technology would be able to solve all conceivable problems. Made entirely of plastic, Futuro was both a reflection of its time and a utopian vision of the "future state of affairs."

Exploring geological epochs and kingdoms of life, Realms voyages through deep time from the primeval ocean to a post-human future. The film employs visual storytelling, seeking to replace the anthropocentric worldview with greater attention to the complex interrelationships and dependencies between organisms, and between animate and inanimate nature.

Do machines play music? Is there a difference between a dot matrix printer and a record turntable? Optical Sound, Taanila’s 2005 wide-screen interpretation of [The User]’s brutalist sound piece for an array of obsolete printers, depicts the devices ratcheting horizontally together in a stalled symphony, inkjets repeatedly blackening the same area on the page. It is not the blurring of man with machine that lies at the core of this film, but the blurring of the spaces that each has been traditionally obliged to occupy. We disappear into our data streams, which are everywhere and “nowhere” at the same time. (Ken Hollings)

A compilation from the independent record label Bad Vugum founded in 1987, originally based in Oulu, Finland. Bad Vugum consists of indie rock, noise rock, experimental rock, electronica, hardcore punk, and thrash metal. The label's name comes from an epithet invented by Captain Beefheart, heard uttered during his song "Sue Egypt". Many releases were championed by the BBC radio DJ John Peel.

A found-footage film based on 35mm film material from an anonymous Finnish physical test that took place in the 1940s. The original purpose of the test remains unknown today.

The Finnish artist Mika Taanila manipulates found scientific footage - a registration of an eclipse that took place in 1945 in northern Finland - that he shows in both positive and negative.

The story of Anna, who is searching for true love and meets Lauri on Midsummer's Eve.

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.

In 1965, Swedish composer/musician Jan Bark proposed an experiment for a new kind of 'music for black-and-white TV'. Bark's friend Erkki Kurenniemi programmed the animations. The original version was lost: this reconstruction was made with the help of Bark's diaries, laboratory notes and reminiscences from people involved.

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.