Harstad Kino, screen 1

The lead actress Andrea Bræin Hovig will be in conversation with Bård Borch Michalsen after the screening. The conversation will be in Norwegian, but the film i subtitled in English.

In this film, we meet the doctor Marianne and her colleague, the nurse Tor. Neither of them is looking for a conventional relationship. One evening when Marianne is on her way home by boat after a date, she meets Tor who spends the nights on the ferry where he cruises after other men. When Marianne hears Tor talk about the casual proximity and conversations that can arise in connection with cruising, she begins to consider whether this could also be an option for her.

Production year: 2024

Running time: 119 minutes

Cast: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Thomas Gullestad, Lars Jacob Holm, Marte Engebrigtsen

Director: Dag Johan Haugerud

Producer: Hege Hauff Hvattum og Yngve Sæther

Director of photography: Cecilie Semec

Screen writer: Dag Johan Haugerud

Genres: Drama

Languages: Norwegian

Subtitles: English

Main nationality: Norge

Harstad Kino, screen 2

In the book Women, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha suggests a mode of writing which no longer reduces it to a means of expressing a reality or emitting a message. She suggests Mirror-Writing, a form of writing meshed with endless reflexivity, that constantly refers to other writings, and the process/nature of writing itself.

This film program, Commitments to Mirror-Writing, takes inspiration from this concept and features works by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. These films explore notions of language and other forms of expression as deeply tied to post-colonial processes of displacement, to decentered realities and cultural hybridization. The mirror here is not a metaphor for self-reflection or a two-way dialogue between "I and I." Rather, it is a shattered mirror—where multiple layers of reflection and refraction converge. This shattered mirror becomes a symbol of a language of rupture, representing multiple, fragmented identities.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi’s film Into The Violet Belly (2022) moves back and forth between different voices, visual registers and timescales creating an image of multitudes. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Mouth to Mouth (1975) is a video meditation on how language can express nuanced feelings of displacement. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) is a richly layered, collage of the experiences of multiple generations of women. This confluence of voices refuses to choose a single, dominant narrative, yet ties them together through various cultural signifiers.

Commitments to Mirror-Writing is therefore structured as a transhistorical conversation between three feminist filmmakers, articulated through the language of their films. After the screening the artist Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and curator Abirami Logendran will continue the conversation in the cinema and also read poems and excerpts from Trinh T. Minh-ha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s writings.

Films:

Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth (1975)*

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Into The Violet Belly (2022)

*Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation. Copyright: Regents of the University of California. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952, Hanoi, Vietnam) is an filmmaker, writer, composer and visual artist who lives and works in California, USA, where she teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric. Her practice explores cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and feminism. Her genre-crossing films have been variously described as ethnographic or political documentaries, essay films and allegorical feature films. She investigates themes of post-and-neo-colonialism, identity and filmmaking, emphasising process and ambiguity over direct message. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, her work has been exhibited and published widely around the world.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Pusan, South Korea) was a multi-disciplinary artist. From the mid-1970s until her death at age 31 in 1982, she created a rich body of conceptual art that explored displacement and loss. Cha’s works included artist’s books, mail art, performance, audio, video, film, and installation. Although grounded in French psychoanalytic film theory, her art is also informed by far-ranging cultural and symbolic references, from shamanism to Confucianism and Catholicism. Her collage-like book Dictée, published posthumously in 1982, is recognized as an influential investigation of identity in the context of history, ethnicity, and gender.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi (b. 1988, Reutlingen, Germany) is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Collaborating with characters in search of consciousness, language, and freedom, her recent body of work explores the aesthetic, political, epistemological possibilities of image and sound. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently a PhD researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media, the University of Westminster and a fellow at the Junge Akademie, the Academy of Arts.

Abirami Logendran (b. 1992, Oslo, Norway) is an artist, critic and curator. She has master's degrees in screen culture from the University of Oslo and in visual arts from the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts. She is a film curator at Kunstnernes hus, film critic in Klassekampen and the editor of Norwegian Art Yearbook.

Harstad Kino, screen 1

Product details

One single injection unlocks your DNA.

Starting a new cellular division that will release a better version of yourself.

You just have to share.

One week for one. And one week for the other.

A perfect balance of seven days each.

The only thing not to forget: you can't escape from yourself.

How to use

Activate only once.

Stabilize every day.

Switch every seven days. Without exception.

Remember you are one.

ATTENTION!

Horror effects and bloody scenes give this film a 15-year age limit. The film contains visual effects and flashing lights that may affect those who have photosensitive epilepsy or are photosensitive.

Actors: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

Genre: Horror / Sort komedie

Director and script: Coralie Fargeat

USA, UK, France, 2024

Age limit: 15 .

Language: English with norwegian subtitles

Harstad Kino, sal 2

WARNING: Sequences of bright flashing lights occur

Kabelvåg School of Moving Images presents LET US EXPERIMENT(<3/!);

The programme consists of nine films created by current students at the school. Some films are finished works, others are sketches or school assignments, but what they all have in common is that they, in their own way, experiment with moving images.

The programme's title is both an invitation and an order. Both a loving collective encouragement and an assertive call. As students at the school, we want to uphold the experiment and expand and explore the horizons of the medium. The programme is a unique insight into what it means to study moving images at the Kabelvåg School of Moving Images in this moment. Welcome to our laboratory.

Ångesten (6 min) af Alma Bech

A disenchanted conversation with two selves (3 min, work in progress) af Tandi Reason Dahl 

Cello_skisse_1 (12 min) af August Storvik

Person Jeg Ikke Kjenner (4 min) af Eskil Fossum

Overveldelse (2 min) af Abel Skancke Aarflot

skisse_1_hjem (7 min) af Nora Aarrestad

Gråzone (5 min) af Momo Mentha

Brudstykker af en afsked i midnatssol (9 min) af Aviaja Skotte

bunny bunny (6 min) af Lukas Kindsholm

Saturday 9th of November 2024, 1.30 for 2.pm.

Várdobáiki Sami Centre
Skånlandsveien 78, 9440 Evenskjer, Norway.

The performance lasts an hour, followed by light food and then artist presentations and talk at 3.45.pm.

A bus departs 12:50 from outside Harstad Kino – departing from Várdobáiki 5pm.

If you arrive by car please park behind the venue.

The performance and buss journey is free, but a ticket must be collected for each the performance and the bus journey.

Our Time is Now is the commissioned work for AMIFF 2024 facilitated by Várdobáiki sámi guovddaš / Várdobáiki Sami center and Márkomannu culture and music festival. Curated by Kjetil Berge.

An audiovisual installation and live performance with Dubmorphology, Risten Anine Gaup, Runa Bergsmo and Rámavuol Elle Bigge / Ellen Berit Dalbakk In the Várdobáiki Arena, film, sound and images are digitally interpreted in real time and mixed in a performance that blurs the distinction between the digital and the physical.

Dubmorphology explores objects, data, materiality and the formation of social and cultural identity. This summer Dubmorphology had an artist residency at Várdobáiki Sami Center. Our Time is Now is the amplified residual echo of the meeting with Várdobáiki and Márkomannu informed by the artists applying the theory, principles and practice of dub that have emerged from the African diaspora.

Artist biographies:

Dubmorphology

Comprised of artists Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison, Dubmorphology is a London based research, production and performance project which produces experimental sound and visual installations, examining the relationship between culture and technology. The work created emerges from the artists’ direct response to specific sites and environments and incorporates historical and contemporary material exploring social and political issues. Dubmorphology has projects internationally at festivals and art venues and have recently collaborated with artist John Akomfrah at the large scale installation at the British pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale.

“Through experimental approaches to sound art, live cinema and installations, Dubmorphology blurs the boundaries between the sonic, visual and performative. Its practice is distinguished by its ongoing investigation into the unique spaces emerging in museums, art galleries and public spaces formed by the shifting intersections between audiences, authorship and participation." — Michael McMillan.

Risten Anine Gaup is from Guovdageaidnu and Gratangen in south Troms and is a Sami cultural communicator, musician and actor. From an early age, she has performed with joik, theater and other cultural communication. She has, among other things, worked as a cultural school teacher in theater and joik for Sami children and young people, has had shows with storytelling and dramatization for joik and is currently active as a performing artist/musician in various music projects and performances (OZAS, Vástádus eana, Det nye nord, Spiti ++). while also exploring her own solo projects that involve the practice of joik.

This year, she was featured as the lead actress in the Sami blockbuster Eallogierdu - Guardians of the Tundra. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and had its cinema premiere in Norway in February. She was nominated for Amanda for Best Actress for her role in the film.

Runa Bergsmo is a trained classical cellist, with education from Oslo and Maastricht. She has worked as a regional musician in Northern Norway for just over 30 years and is employed by Scene Nord in Troms County Municipality. In this job, she gets the opportunity to collaborate with various musicians and artists, switch between several genres and develop her personal strengths.

In the last 15 years, composing, singing, writing song lyrics and screenplays have taken up more and more of her time. Playing the cello and singing in combination has become her trademark, both alone and with various partners. She has released three critically acclaimed albums for children (Released 2017, 2020, and 2023).

In 2021, she received the Teskjekjerring prize for her work with children's concerts and album releases. In 2022 she was commissioned to write the soundtrack for the landscape film NORTH for Galleri Eva Harr (Released 2022).

Rámavuol Elle Bigge / Ellen Berit Dalbakk is a duojár, practitioner of Sami craft knowledge, based in the home village of Rámavuollie in Dielddanuorri Tjeldsund and Giron Kiruna on the Swedish side. She has duodjie training from Sámij åhpådusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke Jokkmokk and has also learned a lot of her duodjie through the collective in Stuornjárgga sámiid duodjie, of which her mother is also a part. Elle Bigge works with dipmaduodjie, soft materials. She is particularly keen to see duodjie as a collective tradition, as well as an obvious part of the contemporary world.

Harstad Kino, screen 2

Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta on the West Bank, has been fighting the mass expulsion of his community by Israel's occupation since childhood. He documents the slow-motion eradication of the villages in his home region where soldiers deployed by the Israeli government are gradually demolishing houses and driving out their residents. At some point, he meets Yuval, an Israeli journalist, who supports him in his efforts. An unlikely alliance develops. But the relationship between the two is strained by the enormous inequality between them: Basel lives under military occupation while Yuval lives freely and without restrictions.

This film by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists has been made as an act of creative resistance on the path to greater justice.

Directors: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Balal

Palestine, Norway, 2024

Rating: 15 years

Language: Arabic

Subtitles: English

Harstad Kino, screen 1

Introduction to the film with director Egil Pedersen.

Elvira, a confident Sámi teenager, firmly believes that her mother conceived her at a Danish fertility clinic. She often daydreams about her father, envisioning him as a charismatic movie star. However, her world is turned upside down when her real biological father unexpectedly steps into her life. Set against the breathtaking backdrop of Norway’s northernmost region, this family film features quirky dialogues, a captivating female protagonist, and an unforgettable supporting role by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

Director: Egil Pedersen

Genre: Drama

Original title: Biru Unjárga

Country of production: Norway, Sweden, Finland

Year of production: 2024

Length: 78

Original language: Sámi, Norwegian, English, Danish

Subtitles: English

Rating: 6 years of age

Harstad Kino, screen 1

Three men set out on a journey in the footsteps of Helge Ingstad to find a lost Apache tribe in Mexico. What was supposed to be an adventurous boyhood dream quickly becomes something entirely different.

Eight years ago, Danish screenwriter Lars K. Andersen had an idea for a film inspired by his childhood hero, Helge Ingstad. In 1937, Ingstad traveled to Mexico to follow in the footsteps of a lost Apache tribe. Alongside Norwegian Håvard Bustnes, the director behind Name of the Game, he decides to follow in Ingstad's footsteps.

The starting point for Bustnes' new film is an eccentric «road movie» that quickly develops into something entirely different. They are forced to confront and dismantle the myth of the white adventurer, and at the same time, they are compelled to reflect on their role as outsiders and ask themselves: Is this really their story to tell?

Norway, Finland, USA, Mexico, 2024

Director: Håvard Bustnes

Screenplay: Lars Kristian Andersen

Runtime: 1h 39m

Language: English, Danish, Spanish, Norwegian

Subtitles: English

Genre: Documentary

Age limit: 9

Harstad Kino, screen 2

Screening followed by a panel conversation with artists Tanya Busse and Miloš Trakilović, moderated by the curator of this screening, Liv Brissach

Language: English

Image-making and warfare technologies are intimately connected, historically and presently. In this screening, works by three artists whose work actively engages with the politics of war and the politics of the image, are presented. Their speculative approaches to present day image operations, counter-war strategies and memorialisation are examples of pertinent artistic approaches to current and past events, the media and technology.

Adversarial Infrastructure (2020), by Anna Engelhardt

10 min

Initial research into the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine yielded a key insight: logistical infrastructure is a form of hybrid warfare. The contemporary Crimean Bridge, a propaganda megaproject built to reinforce the Russian occupation of Crimea, inflicts harm to both Crimean populations and Ukrainian maritime logistics. By producing a deepfake video where Putin unabashedly declares the bridge as the epitome of Russian colonialism, the project exposes the weaponisation of logistics.

The Poet’s Antidote (2019), by Tanya Busse

12 min 33 sec

Created against the backdrop of northern Europe – Cold War fears, a changing political landscape, and the remnants of post-military architecture – The Poet’s Antidote was originally conceived for a site-specific installation located in a now defunct Nato submarine base. The video, which is part of a work series with photographs and sculptures, is the result of an ongoing conversation the artist has with a Noaidi (Sami shaman, poet and friend) in which they attempt to imagine a spell that destroys the war machine. Norway is one of the world’s largest arms exporters, and in its own way, this work tries to confront the military industrial complex through spiritual means.

Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously (2023), by Miloš Trakilović

24 min 40 sec

Filmed in the Netherlands, Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and oscillating between simulated and existing landscapes, Colorless Green Freedoms Sleep Furiously unfolds as an inquisitive and poetic dream sequence that challenges the hegemonic role of vision and truth in the narratives of war and visual culture at large. Through the lens of his family history, specifically his mother’s escape from the Bosnian War with her two children in 1995, Trakilović invokes the invisible, unrelenting spectral forces that constitute the experience and memory of war and its aftermath. The film entwines heartfelt triangulations between green, grass, and freedom with the coded and simulative nature of digital technologies in which green plays an imperative role, such as the green screen or chroma key, and computer-generated imagery.

Miloš Trakilović is a Bosnian-Dutch artist. He obtained a BFA and MFA from the University of Arts in Berlin, where he graduated from the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. His work focuses on the political aspects of perceptibility, exploring issues such as dissolution, fragmentation, memory and loss. His practice includes a strong research component and is primarily centered on digital media, with film, video, animation, and installation as central elements. His work has been presented in National Art Center, Tokyo (2024); Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2023); Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2023); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022); Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2021); Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2021); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2020); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2019) among others.

Tanya Busse is a visual artist working across mediums of moving-image, installation and photography. Her practice explores the synthesis of nature often combined with an industrial, post-human presence. She is interested in deep-time, invisible architecture and how power is produced and articulated through material relationships and histories of place. Her works have been presented in a number of exhibitions, including Greenlight Triennial 2024, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, the 13th Turku Biennial of Art in Finland, the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Nanaimo Art Gallery in British Columbia, Gallery 44 Center for Photography in Toronto Canada, Mumbai Art Room India, Podium Gallery, Oslo, Vaga Center for Art and Knowledge, Sao Miguel, Azores, Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden, amongst others. She is the co-director of New Mineral Collective, a collaborative practice that explores landscapes of extraction, and also Mondo Books, an independent book platform that publishes and distributes printed materials across the circumpolar north. She currently lives and works in Tromsø, Norway.

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a video artist and writer. Her investigative practice follows the traces of material violence, focusing on what could be seen as the ‘ghost’ of information. The toxic information environments she deals with stem from structures of occupation and dispossession. Her work has been shown at transmediale, Berlin; ICA, London; Kyiv Biennial; Ars Electronica; Biennial TEA Tenerife; National Gallery of Art, Lithuania; BFI London Film Festival; B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt; The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Oslo.

Liv Brissach works as a curator at the Northern Norwegian Art Museum / Davvi Norgga Dáiddamusea. They previously worked as Curator of Contemporary Art at MUNCH in Oslo, Norway, and as Project Officer at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Brissach was co-curator of the MUNCH Triennale – The Machine is Us (2022) and assistant curator for The Sámi Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. They trained as an art historian at University College London and at the University of Oslo, and their texts can be found in publications by Artes Mundi, MUNCH, OCA and Fotogalleriet.

Friday November 8th, 11.20am at Harstad Kino, screen 2.

This short film programme presents four young artists who use sound as a starting point to cultivate a relationship with identity and the past. Voices, poems, songs and sound recordings take center stage. They form a basis for visual poetry, for exploring questions of identity and politics and for searching for new sounds and harmonies.

Samstemming [Agreement]- Erik Alstad, 25m
An exploration of time and sound through homemade science fiction. A test subject uses a new hearing aid that can pick up the sounds and voices in the objects around her.

Samtaler om trær [Conversations about trees] - Oda Fjellang, 5m19s
Conversations about trees is a film inspired by Athena Farrokhzad's monologue this summer in the national radio channel P2. It's about everything we have to talk about instead. And about why it can be difficult to talk about trees.

Hurdo (sleep) - Nadra Abdi Hassan, 1m7s
This is a short look at the inner chambers of my internal eyes. Captured on digicam (Kodak easy share cx7300).

That's a Gabay (poem)? - Nadra Abdi Hassan, 0m46s
Fractured configurations in formulation, contemplating what poetic potion I should pour into the sea.

An anthropology on Somali poets and their lost loves. - Nadra Abdi Hassan, 3m11s
For the love of songs and all things anatomically romantic in Somali. I gift you the bleeding artery of jaceyl (love). A visual poem of poems and their tunes.

Den andre sangen - Jostein Venås, 33m11s
The filmmaker finds recordings of his great-grandfather singing in Sámi, a language he cannot understand. The repercussions of the state organized assimilation process of the indigenous Sámi in Norway have taken many shapes – among them generational silence. In conversation with his grandmother, he tries to explore this lost heritage, a search facing the complexities of self-identification and aftereffects of identity politics.

Harstad Kino, screen 2

Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has long fought for the rights of her people. When her son suddenly dies, Aaju embarks on a journey to reclaim her language and culture after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation. But can she both change the world and mend her own wounds?

This documentary has been nominated for the Nordic Film Prize, representing Greenland.

Aaju Peter, Sofia Jannok, Makka Kleist, Vivi Nielsen, Aleqa Hammond, John Erling Utsi, Paninnguaq Heilmann, Asta Helms, Anne Kirstine Hermann, Rasmus Holm

Director: Lin Alluna

Manuscript: Aaju Peter

Canada, Danmark, Greenland, 2023

Language and subtitles: English

Venue: Harstad Kino, screen 1

English subtitles

The AMIFF 2024 opening film is The Tundra Within Me by Sara Margrethe Oskal. The lead actress Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup was nominated for the Norwegian Oscar, Amanda, for her role in the film this year. Gaup has family from the local area of Harstad. Gaup will be in conversation with Bård Borch Michalsen after the screening. The conversation will be in norwegian, but the film has english subtitles.

Kvernmo Gaup will also be part of the commisioned work for AMIFF 2024, Our Time is Now, which will be an audiovisual performance by Dubmorphology at Várdobáiki Sami Centre November 9th.

About the film The Tundra Within Me:

After living for many years in Oslo, Lena moves back to Sápmi in Northern Norway with her young son to explore Sami gender in an art project. While researching in the wintry tundra, she falls in love with reindeer herder Máhtte - whose mother, the head of the family, disapproves of the relationship. As decisions from the past come to haunt her, Lena struggles to find out whether her and Máhtte's lifestyles can ever be compatible.

The film had it's world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival in 2023.

Sami language

English subtitles.

Runtime: 95 min

PG-12