Sodankylä Forever: The Century of Cinema

Over the last quarter of a century, many of the best and the brightest have come to the Midnight Sun Night Film Festival in Sodankylä to talk about their art. Out of literally hundreds of hours of taped public discussions with Samuel Fuller, Marlen Huciev, Jacques Demy, Michael Powell, Jancsó Miklós, Dino Risi, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrej Smirnov, Ivan Passer, Joseph H. Lewis, Aleksej German, Mario Monicelli, Francis Ford Coppola, Claude Sautet and others, Von Bagh has carved and chiselled a forceful, fast-paced, often melancholic – while time and again unexpectedly funny – essay about cinema as the essence of the 20th century. A splendid work – half elegy, half rallying cry – that sees the programming of films as the art of building a community, and festivals as a utopia that, perplexingly enough, is within our reach – if we chose to embark upon the journey.

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