Underground Film Journal

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Cinema Project: Work By Susanna Helke

By Mike Everleth ⋅ November 27, 2009

Text logo for the Northwest Film Center

Dec. 1
7:30 p.m.
Northwest Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium at the Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Ave.
Portland, OR 97205

Hosted by: Cinema Project, Northwest Film Center and Pacific University Media Arts

Susanna Helke is a documentary filmmaker and film theorist from Finland. She will be in Portland for a special one-night only screening of four of her films, two of which are in 35mm and two that are in video.

People standing on a dirt road in the middle of the woods

These films are co-directed with Virpi Suutari and blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. Helke’s personal description of the films places them in the realm of “replayed reality.” The two films are: White Sky, which offers up a portrait of a Russian family trying to get by while living under the shadow of an enormous nickel plant, while Sin is a “documentary of daily offenses.” The two videos, War and Spring, are both commentaries on Finnish youth.

The Sin [1996, 35mm, color, sound, 33 min.]

Spring [2006, Beta, color, sound, 16 min.]

War [2006, Beta, color, sound, 5 min.]

White Sky [1998, 35mm, color, sound, 54 min.]

Watch an excerpt from The Sin: