Finnish filmmaker, festival director and author Peter von Bagh is cooking up a new documentary that looks set to be a cinephile’s delight, he tells Geoffrey Macnab
Sodankylä Forever, as the film is called, should be ready in time for the 25th anniversary edition of the Midnight Sun Festival this summer, the event Von Bagh runs with the Kaurismäki brothers (Aki and Mika) in Finnish Lapland, a hundred and twenty kilometers above the Arctic Circle where the sun doesn't set at all in the summertime. If you want to get into the dark, the only way is to watch movies.
The film will feature footage of the hundred or so in-depth discussions Von Bagh has conducted at the festival over the last quarter of a century, with auteurs ranging from Michael Powell to Sam Fuller, from Francis Ford Coppola to Richard Fleischer, from Abbas Kiarostami to Milos Forman, from John Boorman to Krzysztof Kieslwoski, from Samira Makhmalbaf to Val Guest. “It is something that started from the first day of the festival: every day we have this two-hour discussion with our guests,” Von Bagh said during a brief visit to IFFR this week.
Homage
As visitors to Midnight Sun quickly discover, Von Bagh’s interviews are probing and thorough. He quizzes directors about their childhoods and influences. “It amounts to some kind of psychoanalysis of the directors,” Von Bagh said. The interviews were all filmed. Von Bagh will edit the documentary collage-style, so the filmmakers seem to be in conversation with one another in what its director calls “some kind of heavenly discussion” between the auteurs.
Von Bagh describes Sodankylä Forever as “a homage to all film festivals… it shows the heart of the whole festival movement and what it should be: that there should be an absolute love of cinema at the centre of an enterprise like film festivals. That is something you can sense here in Rotterdam, but 90% of film festivals are not about that.”
Stripped down
Over the last quarter century, the Midnight Sun Festival has attracted many illustrious guests. The great American director Sam Fuller (Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss) was at the very first festival and had a street named after him. Francis Ford Coppola was a visitor in 2002, and threw himself wholeheartedly into the festival activities. “Coppola was a wonderful guest because he was so much a team player,” recalls Von Bagh of the American director’s visit to Sodankylä. “He totally stripped down the possibility that he would be treated as a star. He was totally acting according to the rules of the festival. He was a very ordinary human being, very humble and very generous… he liked the nature, he liked the alcohol and he liked the Finnish sauna.”
Sacred hobby
Aki Kaurismäki has also been a continual presence at the event and will feature prominently in the documentary. “When he came to the festival right at the beginning, he was very secretive. For the first five years, he was mainly in the projector cabin, because he was the technical director. He almost always avoided social occasions.” Von Bagh’s relationship with the maverick Finnish director stretches back many years, to when Von Bagh was head of the Finnish Film Archive and Kaurismäki was an ardent young cinephile. “Aki was not living in Helsinki, but in Tampere. He was completely nuts about cinema. He came every day to the film archive showings. The bond we have is simply that I chose the films which form his film culture.”
A prolific author, Von Bagh has written many film books. He also runs Il Cinema Ritrovato (Cinema Rediscovered), a festival in Bologna dedicated to the rediscovery of rare features, especially from the silent era. His recent documentary Helsinki! Forever has won many plaudits on the festival circuit. He describes running film festivals as the perfect antidote to writing about them and directing his own docs. “My time is divided between filmmaking activities and writing. I define this film festival leadership as a sacred hobby!”