Arctic Festival 2024

6th Edition
19–21/9/2024
Tromsø

The Embassy of the Czech Republic in Oslo and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic (MFA) in cooperation with Norwegian partners in Tromsø (UiT The Arctic University of Norway, the Sámi House, the City Library and Archive, the Cinematheque, the Bastard Bar and the Karmelittklosteret “Totus Tuus”), the Prague Film School FAMU, Czech Television and other Czech, Greenlandic, Swedish and Norwegian film partners, and the music band Už jsme doma (UJD) organised the 6th edition of the Arctic Festival (AF) in Tromsø, North Norway, on 19-21 September 2024. AF 2024 devoted a lot of space to the two indigenous ethnic groups of the Arctic – the Sámi and the Inuit.

The AF 2024 programme traditionally consisted of a sci-art conference and a cultural programme (film festival, exhibitions and a concert). A summary information and sub-programmes are listed on the AF website (https://arktickyfestival.cz/en/arctic-festival/). The FB event was created: (1) ARCTIC FESTIVAL 2024 Tromsø | Facebook.

The AF was officially opened on Thursday, 19 September at 10.30 at UiT with the vernissage of the exhibition “Julius Payer: The North Pole Expedition”. The UiT’s Pro-Rector Jan-Gunnar Winther and H. E. David Červenka, Czech Ambassador to Norway and Iceland, opened the subsequent Sci-art Conference with welcoming remarks.

The following lectures were delivered:

Urbanisation and development of technological support for human life in the Arctic;Development of low temperature algal bioprospection (Josef Elster, Centre for Polar Ecology, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, České Budějovice & Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Třeboň, Czechia)

Svalbard: Nature in rapid transformation with a changing climate (Kim Holmén, Special advisor, Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway)

Polar researcher Julius Payer (Zdeněk Lyčka, AF’s main organizer, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Czechia)

Norwegianization and education: a distant past? (Lukáš Košner, Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Education, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway)

From Ice Age into today – The story of the spread of an Arctic-Alpine plant species from the Czech mountains to Svalbard and Greenland (Martin Hajman, Leading research technician, Botanical Garden, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway)

The forests of possibility – beneath the sea (Ann Eileen Lennert, Environmental Anthropologist, Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Norway)

How to do science in polar regions without a station – the case of Estonian polar research (Lauri Laanisto, Professor of macroecology, Head of Chair of Biodiversity and Nature Tourism, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu, Estonia)
Arctic Festival – a traditional event connecting Czech and Arctic (Nordic) culture and science (Zdeněk Lyčka, AF’s main organizer, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Czechia)

The abstracts of all lectures in English are on the AF website.

CULTURAL PROGRAMME

The cultural programme started on 19 September with the opening of the exibition “The Dog with a Bun – Greenlandic fairy tales and legends / Ilustrations by Martin Velíšek“ at the City Library and Archives. The following day, the exhibition “Just Knud Qvigstad: Sámi fairy tales and legends / Ilustration by Luboš Drtina“ was opened at the Sámi House. Both exhibitions will be on view in Tromsø until 20 October 2024, and then they will be shown in other venues in North Norway and in Denmark.

On 19–20 September, the Arctic Film Festival took place at Verdensteatret/Cinemateket. Its programme was as follows:

A series of short films by Nordic FAMU graduates “The Northerners at FAMU“, collected by an Estonian alumni Priit Pöhjala (FAMU Int. Prague):

- Idiots at the Hunting Shop (dir. Isabelle Berglund, SE/CZ 2019, 08:09)
- Blue Boy (dir. Nikulás Tumi Hlynsson, IS/CZ 2023, 12:40)
- Slávek the Shit (dir. Grímur Hákonarson, IS/CZ 2004, 15:00)
- A Sheep Story (dir. Rakel Andresdóttir, IS/CZ 2023, 05:55)
- The Ribs (dir. Esben Sloth, DK/CZ 2023, 12:46)
- Another Danish Spring (dir. Karl Forchhammer, DK/CZ 2015, 14:19)
- Gluttons (dir. Joel Hukki, FI/CZ 2023, 15:57)
- The Moon Never Cries (dir. Rafael Bing, NO/CZ 2024, 12:31)
- Heart of the Wolf (dir. Jørgen Sporsheim, NO/CZ 2014, 12:43)