Director Pirjo Honkasalo’s Concrete Night, which screens in HIFF’s Spotlight Selection, will be shown  at Toronto International Film Festival.

Honkasalo’s film will be screened in the prestigious Masters series, which showcases new films from the world’s most influential arthouse filmmakers. The film will be represented in Toronto by director Pirjo Honkasalo and producers Mark Lwoff and Misha Jaari.

Concrete Night marks the return to fictional filmmaking for Honkasalo, who is internationally acclaimed for her accomplishments both within the documentary and fictional field. Concrete Night is based on a novel by Finnish author Pirkko Saisio. The story features two brothers, Ilkka and Simo, who spend one last night together in the concrete jungle of Helsinki before the older one has to go to prison to serve a sentence. A boundless admiration for the older Ilkka, his only available role model, leads Simo to look for his identity in all the wrong places. Concrete Night will get its theatrical release in Finland on November 1st, 2013. The film’s trailer can be seen here.

Pirjo Honkasalo –  an award-winning multi-talent

Pirjo Honkasalo is one of Finland’s most acclaimed directors internationally. She has worked both as a director, screenwriter, editor and film photographer. One of her most famous films is the award-winning documentary The 3 Rooms of Melacholia, which portrays Russian and Chechen children who have been psychologically affected by the war. In the 70s and 80s, she directed several feature films together with Pekka Lehto, such as Flame Top, which competed in Cannes in 1980. In the 1990’s she continued by herself and turned to feature documentaries, directing the award-winning The Triology of the Sacred and the Satanic (Mysterion, Tanjuska and the 7 Devils and Atman). Later Honkasalo was invited to shoot the documentary Ito – A Diary of an Urban Priest, about a young Buddhist priest who runs a bar in Tokyo.