Venue: Verdensteatret/Cinematek i Tromsø (Storgata 93, 9008 Tromsø, Norway)
Thursday, 19 September
16.00–16.10
Official opening of the Arctic Film Festival
16.10–18.00
Northerners at FAMU (SE/IS/DK/FI/NO/CZ 2004–2024, 110 min, short films, EN subtitles).
For decades North European filmmakers have moved to Czechia to study at the prestigious film school FAMU in Prague. Live action fiction, animation films and documentaries from the last two decades have been selected as a showcase and a presentation of FAMU to any possible future students who might be interested in studying in Prague. Priit Põhjala, an Estonian alumnus and mentor of FAMU International Prague, curates the selection.
Idiots at the Hunting Shop (dir. Isabelle Berglund, SE/CZ 2019, 08:09)
Two young actors try to impress a famous director to get roles in his next film.
Blue Boy (dir. Nikulás Tumi Hlynsson, IS/CZ 2023, 12:40)
After a random encounter outside a nightclub, a young house painter ends up at an afterparty with a charming couple, only to find himself trapped in a power game between the two, who use him as a prop to relight their flame.
Slávek the Shit (dir. Grímur Hákonarson, IS/CZ 2004, 15:00)
A love story taking place in a public toilet in the centre of Prague. The toilet guard Slavek falls in love with a female guard who is working across the street.
A Sheep Story (dir. Rakel Andresdóttir, IS/CZ 2023, 05:55)
A person has made a home inside a living sheep, slowly eating it from within and causing the sheep great pain.
The Ribs (dir. Esben Sloth, DK/CZ 2023, 12:46)
As a mother ascends a seemingly endless staircase, she plays a dark game with her son where nothing, but their imagination sets the limits of how far it can go.
Another Danish Spring (dir. Karl Forchhammer, DK/CZ 2015, 14:19)
After making a short film in Denmark, a director has to face the fact that he is not anymore welcome back home, to Iran. Having a life in limbo, his friend follows him during the asylum process. How does it feel to shift from being a voluntary to a forced migrant?
Gluttons (dir. Joel Hukki, FI/CZ 2023, 15:57)
Three men caught in a power struggle over the feeding order.
The Moon Never Cries (dir. Rafael Bing, NO/CZ 2024, 12:31)
A mother’s long sleepless night.
Heart of the Wolf (dir. Jørgen Sporsheim, NO/CZ 2014, 12:43)
A musical love story with a supernatural twist.
Friday, 20 September
16.30 –17.58
Historjá – Stitches for Sápmi (SE 2022, 88 min, dir. Thomas Jackson, EN subtitles)
Historjá is a poetic and striking told story of the Sámi female artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. Her art describes the Sámi culture, today and historically, and the reindeer husbandry, threatened by the global climate crisis.
18.00–18.17
The Price of a Story (CZ/GL 2024, 17 min, dir. Lukáš Masner, EN subtitles)
A rich Czech tourist and his translator come to an Inuit shaman – a Greenlandic Angakkoq. The meeting is arranged at a local museum and its purpose is a legendary meeting of the Angakkoq‘s and the Czech‘s ancestors. The foreigner is willing to pay a lot of money for the story. By the Inuit’s suggestive narration, a fiction story from the times of the first Christian missionaries in Greenland comes to life. It is a mystical story about a misunderstanding between a young missionary and a shaman that must be resolved by Inuit magic.
18.20–19.13
Icy Adventure (CZ 2024, 53 min, dir. Vladimír Šimek, EN subtitles)
A fascinating voyage of the sailing ship “Boomerang” under the command of Captain Jiří Zindulka to the distant shores of Greenland. Pure beauty and unbridled yet vulnerable nature in the ice sheet. The film charts a voyage of almost 2,000 nautical miles through the Arctic Ocean. An expedition to places of frost and ice. But this was no mere adventure. Director Vladimír Šimek gives the audience access to the authentic atmosphere of these wild lands. To experience the overwhelming and at the same time fragile splendour that goes beyond simple human imagination. The film offers its viewers an extraordinary aesthetic experience.
19.15–20.38
The Visitors (CZ/SK/NO 2022, 83 min, dir. Veronika Lišková, EN subtitles)
A young anthropologist, Zdenka, moves with her husband and three sons to Svalbard, Norway, to study how life is changing in polar regions. She has received a prestigious two-year grant to carry out extensive research on the impact of globalisation on the inhabitants of the world‘s northernmost town, Longyearbyen. After falling in love with her new home, Zdenka discovers that more than icebergs and permafrost are vanishing in the Arctic. Through conducting interviews with residents, she begins to perceive how heterogeneous the small local community actually is, while also revealing tensions that lie beneath the surface. Zdenka then has to work out the extent to which she can get involved in the local community that she only originally intended to observe.