Film Screenings: The City Limits: “Helsinki, Forever” + “Goodnight Sofia”
BOTH SCREENINGS POSTPONED – New schedule to be updated!
Wed 10 Apr 2013, 8 pm
Thu 11 Apr 2013, 8.30 pm
Goethe Institut
From The Onion Cellar:
The Onion Cellar presents Chapter II of The City Limits – a self-curated documentary series focusing on the theme of ‘cities’ (starting last summer with two screenings of Copenhagen Dreams). The films are poignant love letters to cities across the world and the urban generation that lives and dies within them. This time, we travel to Helsinki and Sofia, and we travel to the past.
The screenings are organized with support from Hanoi DocLab.
HELSINKI, FOREVER (April 11 – 8.30 PM)
Dir – Peter von Bagh
Languages: Finnish, subtitles in Vietnamese and English
In the city symphony Helsinki, Forever’s opening sequence, unfazed Finns stroll along an icebreaker entering the harbour, in a kind of glacial encierro. But as impressive as the advancing ship and creaking ice are, many in the crowd cannot help but glance at the camera—and its presence is obvious in the attitudes, the coolness, the bravado. That sets the tone for a movie that is not only an ode to a city, but a love story between that city and the camera. A city dreaming its modernity in images, meeting its people in images, living history in images.
Peter von Bagh (born 1943 in Helsinki, Finland) is a film historian and director. In Helsinki, Forever, he paints a portrait of Finland’s capital with materials taken from all sources, with the graininess of black and white newsreel footage finding a place as easily as scenes from atmospheric lush-coloured feature films (and even paintings); while the juxtaposition of happenings from different eras reveals the all too inevitable passage of time. Buildings raised up and torn down, people queuing for liquor, fighting, falling in love, departing.
But it has always been the same city witnessing it all, the same streets, same squares, same quarters. The history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music) is recounted by three voices, two male (one of them von Bagh’s) and one female—each one reciting, with humour and humanity, what seems to be a slightly different style of poetic and essayistic discourse.
At separate stages we are introduced to the best-ever Finnish camera movement and the best Finnish musical, are invited to browse diverse neighbourhoods and eras, and are finally forced to admit that a surprising amount of very striking film footage has emerged from this country and city, put together by Peter von Bagh in a mesmerizing journey in search of lost time and landscapes and the ghosts of the past.
(text by Mathias Rossignol – additional text by Hung Tran)
GOODNIGHT SOFIA (April 10 – 8PM)
Dir – Leonardo Moro
Languages: Italian, subtitles in Vietnamese and English
(Director’s notes)
“Goodnight Sofia is the story of a voice lost forever. A voice full of life and projects. My father’s voice.
The last memory I have of him, or at least the sharpest, is linked to Sofia and to his voice. It’s a small memory, but it’s the only one I have. A phone call, which lasted five or six minutes; I was passing through Sofia after a trip to Istanbul, he was home. Everything was normal, as usual.
My father took his own life two months later.
For a long time I asked myself how could I save him. Why I did not understand? For a long time I wasn’t able to look at pictures of him or to pronounce his name. I felt betrayed and abandoned.
I went back to Sofia to look for his voice, in those streets that he had never seen. Far from home, far from everything. I started from the end to find him.
In the film, the present is represented by a lonely girl in a ghost town. The past is the recall of an imaginary childhood, almost magic, through my childhood, cinema’s childhood, Sofia’s childhood, and the childhood of other families far and lost.
Goodnight Sofia is not a film on my father. Goodnight Sofia is a film for my father.”
Leonardo Moro
Free entry.
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