National Competition: Time Travels

In Beyond the Bed of Reeds cousins Saija and Kiku end up alone at the family summer cottage, but the years spent apart still linger between them. 

Kai is a coming-of-age story about Paavo, who lives in a small Finnish town in the 1990s and struggles to fit into the uncommunicative male culture of a heteronormative environment. A new world opens up to him when Kai—a shimmering fairytale-like creature—enters his life. However, a shared otherness is not always enough to bring people together.

X is growing up in the 1990s. As a child she makes prank calls and gets her first job in telemarketing as a teenager. Office smells, heavy breathers, and meaningless greetings follow her from one workplace to another. Through archival material and amateur video footage, Am I Calling You at a Bad Time reflects X’s actions as a faceless subject playing with her voice as a commercialised asset.

Photographs Not Taken highlights the intergenerational chain from a female perspective. At the same time, the animation explores the invisible in history: shame, power relations and insecurity in 19th-century Finland.

NATO’s nuclear exercise, a 12-minute uninterrupted tracking shot, and the Finnish Eurovision Song Contest entries collide in the night of Helsinki in November 1983. Equal Dust presents various apocalyptic scenarios, and based on them, presents an alternative storyline from the perspective of the scenarios’ targets, on a real scale, on the streets of nocturnal Helsinki. The difference between imaginary and real nuclear war is revealed to be frighteningly fragile.

Rosa Emilia Clay was a teacher, singer, and choral conductor. In 1899, Rosa became the first African-born person to be granted Finnish citizenship. Facing racism and personal loss, she left Finland for the United States in 1904. In ROSA some of her sisters from the future gather to honor and celebrate her life on Rosa’s 150th birthday.

In Major Bag Alert the year is 2005. Gossip around the school is that 16-year-old Janina’s family is having serious financial troubles. Janina and her group of friends plan to prove the rumours wrong by stealing an expensive handbag from the neighbourhood shopping centre.