Tampere Film Festival

Tampere, 4-8/3/2026

18 meters separate the two lakes whose Tampere is the junction. 18 meters of hydraulic energy that determined the industrial destiny of what many people called “the Manchester of Finland”. 18 meters that, translated into the post-industrial epoch, mean cultural investments, among which the Tampere Film Festival, by now a must-see and almost mythical short film festival in Europe.

For me, this could have been the occasion to discover some Finnish filmmakers, but I preferred to focus on the International Competition, whose accurate selection allows to take the pulse of the creativity of global cinema. In fact, despite some efforts to construct nationalist discourses, the perception of Finland as a cultural oasis attracts waves of international “expats”. Not without a provoking attitude, should we say that internationality is quite a fashionable “Finnish” characteristic?

Without waiting for a series of counterexamples, I decided to pay my homage to a Finnish-and-international institution like the Centre of Finnish Media Art, AV-arkki, whose legendary screening on Saturday morning presented three nice works, one of which, Anton Nikkilä’s Literal Translation, revealed itself as my personal highlight at the festival.

One century after the explosion of Russian avant-gardes, Anton Nikkilä’s film reanimates their explosive spirit in showing their capacity to be a source of inspiration even today. More than showing and watching, in Literal Translation, listening is at stake. Through electronic music, we experience a sculptural sound that “literally translates” the avant-gardes’ claims. Beyond any form of illusionism, cinema becomes a question of matter. Text, sound, and image are blocks that are not intended to mean something but just to be there, as iconoclastic objects available for the senses. The dissolution of storytelling implies active spectatorship and critical commitment. Literal Translation is like these blocks of polished stones upon which one surprisingly stumbles in the middle of a Finnish urbanscape. An awakening of both the senses and the concepts.

Anton Nikkilä | FIN 2018 | 32’
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Selection from the International Competition

If I force myself to an impartial viewer on the International Competition, I have to say that the majority of the most refined films, at least to my eyes, represent a solid narrative cinema that is able to combine the nuanced study of the characters’ psychology with socio-political issues. Clear examples are: Wang Han-Xuan’s Delay; Natalia Mirzoyan’s Winter in March; Maryam Khachtvani’s Inherited Silence; Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s South-Facing Window; Auguste Gerikaite’s Glitter Kiss; Luc Tellier’s Sol vivant; Pawel Chorzepa’s The Tuners. So far, we can go back home with a reinvigorated optimism for the future of qualitative cinema.

Along this “traditional” line, I will also mention Ville Gobi’s A Real Swedish Midsommar for his playing with entertaining use of exaggeration, whereas Joshua Oppenheimer exaggerates in easy cynicism in his The Revolution against Death. Equally cynical but well edited is Lasse Linder’s Air Horse One – an example of clinical gaze. Two further mentions are deserved by Randa Marufi’s conceptual L’Mina, whose use of theatrical re-enactment is shared by Marja Helander’s portrait of Sami activist Niillas Somby in In My Hand.

Yet, in such polished and professional films, as a viewer, I often miss the urgency of expression, or the pleasure of exploring new cinematic territories. To this urgency and to this pleasure, even if they can sometimes take clumsy forms, I will dedicate my selection at the Tampere Film Festival.

«Inherited Silence», by Maryam Khachtvani

«South-Facing Window», by Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir

Bold explorations

Is the internet an unmanageable, ever-growing archive? Yuyan Wang navigates the big data and, with a meticulous work of montage work, is able to extract a meaningful voice out of the nonsensical mass of images that proliferate on our screens. There is a strange family resemblance in this gigantic patchwork, which will tell us the simple story of how oil becomes plastic and inhabits the most different landscapes. In this (literally) synthetic realm, our own imagination will mirror and discover itself a plastic, synthetic, oil imagination. Green Grey Black Brown is a masterful zapping journey where pleasure and guilt conflate.

Yuyan Wang | KOR-CHN-FR 2024 | 10’
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…and Pol Kurucz is not a naïve filmmaker playing with cinema tropes. Or not only. Wes Anderson-like tropes from the Sixties certainly play a central role in this hallucinated family saga that skilfully depicts the most vulgar clichés of American patriarchalism. Then, through a systematic methodology of exaggeration, queerness blossoms like an unexpected guest. Visually boisterous, the filmic seems to be sucked in the scenographic, but the exhibitionist touch still leaves room for moments where not dialogues but cinema itself is able to tell the story through montage, ellipses, framings. Inventiveness and attention to details make Charlie Is Not a Boy definitely more than an acid pamphlet about the grotesque of American society.

Pol Kurucz | USA-FR-HUN 2026 | 14’
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In their multimedia work, French artistic duo Fleuryfontaine focus on technological formations of the relation between people and their environment. Through surveillance camera footage and digital reconstructions, Sixty-Seven Milliseconds reflects on the immediacy of individual acts as well as the structural dimension of police violence. Not unlike the activist work of Forensic Architecture, this film uses CGI-aided spatial analysis to investigate an illegally fired rubber bullet. It is the contingency of violence that haunts this short film – one bullet that gets lost between two frames of a 15-frames-per-second surveillance camera but ultimately destroys the life of a young Parisian. Hannes Wesselkämper

Fleuryfontaine | FR 2025 | 15’
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“Balloonerism” is also the title of Mac Miller’s second posthumous music album, on which Samuel Jerome Mason builds his own animated fantasy around the end of childhood, innocence and guilt. Probably thanks to an “aesthetic of the sublime”, with grandiose landscapes and extreme contrasts – somehow consonant with a certain AI aesthetic… – Mason is able to create a feeling of insuperable distance to childhood, which is reinforced by the absence of sound (except for Mac Miller’s songs, of course) for the daring adventures of the little protagonists of Balloonerism. In a pastiche of mythologies (between caverns and whales – here a giant turtle) and classical tropes of initiatory journeys, the circular structure of the road movie displays the sublimation of the chase pattern, away from monstrous beings, into the regenerating power of music.

Samuel Jerome Mason | USA-FR 2025 | 12’
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Less is more, and boldness can be expressed through reduction. Reduction of storytelling, reduction of meaning, reduction of density. Taiyo Nobata explains himself the concept of his Interlude: «The paradise of life, I believe, exists in the interlude — a fleeting moment granted to all, equally, that quietly arrives between one thing and the next.» What we see on screen is exactly a collection of moments, whose meaninglessness is yet full of tense poetry made of pauses, hesitations. The rigorous absence of humans makes us think… We feel that this collection could continue indefinitely, probably because only we, the humans, can feel the aching beauty of our own absence.

Taiyo Nobata | JAP 2025 | 7’
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Urgent (odd) expressions

A mother almost desperately tries to reconnect with her son thanks to an improbable remote communication through street graffiti; a daughter almost desperately tries to come to terms with her tough mother through a cinematic letter. Leona Cauklija’s Son and Patri Preda & Alina Bracaci’s Uprooting, respectively, witness to the performative power of cinema as healing practice. More than the image, it is the dramaturgic frugality that highlights the vibration of sincerity. The same can be said of Erwan Dean and Constance Delorme’s Papya, which oddly mixes performative playfulness and existential traumata through scenes that, even if clearly staged, convey the freshness of a happening.

There is a performative line in these films, whose manufacture seems to really modify situations in real life. Lotte Salomons’ work Sanyi the Rooster actually continues the surprising work a rooster did in the town of Békéscsaba, Hungary. A posteriori, she documents the social unity a rooster, with his fierceness and freedom, was able to convey in a community eroded by political hatred. Thanks to the reconstruction of such bizarre deeds, the film lets the people confess their intimate feelings and the drama of Hungarian society at the same time. In Shervin Kermani’s Ramon Who Speaks to Ghosts, another “little” story is able to put the particular and the universal together. The schizophrenic personality of a beloved uncle, Ramon, is initially followed with great sympathy and not without humour by the filmmaker. The film, thus, slowly widens the circle of Ramon’s family and acquaintances, and the plurality of perspectives will reveal how Ramon’s suffering is bound to a traumatic experience that is shared by the whole community. From a tolerated exception, Ramon becomes the respected bearer of a collective trauma.