Return of the Atom

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.

The loneliest man in the suburbs opens his door to a stranger and gets caught up in the merry-go-round of love.

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)

What if our greatest fear is not death but worthless life? Fifty years old Kati occupies a top position in a large company. Disappointed in life, leaving work she embarks on a journey into the end of despair. Encounter with another woman at night fails. Kati flees the world hiding inside a forest bunker. A flourishing primitive life turns her petrified life upside down. 

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.

A film essay montage of contemporary footage, archive and cinema history, about the age of post-truth and how one young man’s childhood epilepsy became representative of the woes of the world and how he triumphed against adversity.

A three-week vacation in the middle of a heatwave. Failed Emptiness is an existential thriller that describes the familiar experience of emptiness when responsibilities end.

After EverythingThe film shows a dystopian world where brutality and inhumanity are commonplace and part of everyday routine. The atmosphere of doom is emphasized by the combination of black and white footage, harsh settings and industrial noise music. The powerful story leads to a situation in which brutality is victorious, yet beyond total destruction there is also room for a new beginning.

A woman barricades herself into her apartment and orders a gun in fear.

Night falls down on empty business premises - and lights go up. A minimalistic musical.

Impivaara – A New World adapts Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi's novel Seven Brothers (1870) for the 21st Century. The emphasis is on the climate crisis, the energetic basis of our culture and the co-dependencies of human and more-than-human worlds.