Student work wins Grand Prix at Tampere Film Festival

Miia Tervo

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Miia Tervo’s short film Lumikko (2009) won the Grand Prix of Tampere Film Festival’s International Competition on Sunday.
      The festival was celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and Lumikko is only the third Finnish work to have earned the accolade.
      ”This is crazy shit. I am completely dumbfounded”, Tervo said immediately after having heard of her victory.
     
What adds to the value of Tervo’s success is the fact that Lumikko is the 30-year-old film-maker’s first student work at the Aalto University School of Art and Design.
      And if this was not enough, Tervo and her group also took the main prize of the National Competition in the category for films running at under 30 minutes in length.
      Tervo is a native of the northern city of Rovaniemi and by accident also an old upper secondary school classmate of director Joonas Neuvonen, whose film Reindeerspotting, highlighting the lives of Rovaniemi drug addicts, competed in the same festival.
     
Tervo's film tells about the anguish of a 16-year-old girl, mixing drama with animation.
      The film is constructed around a radio recording of an anonymous girl’s telephone call to psychologist Pekka Sauri’s night-time radio show Yölinja four years ago.
      ”After a victory like this I could call Sauri up myself”, said an ecstatic Tervo.
      In her film, however, the atmosphere is altogether different. The teenage girl who calls the psychiatrist tells him that she has been teased because of her sexual relationship with the male partner of her schoolmate’s mother. The subject is deep to say the very least.
     
According to Tervo, the subject stemmed from her own experiences, the misplaced longing for love. She figured she might find some useable material from the radio tapes of Sauri’s programme - and she did.
      “I spent 300 hours listening to Sauri and the angst of the Finnish people. In the end filmmaking is like sculpting. The film constructs itself. Add this, remove that. The end result is of certain shape and I do not know why. The collage technique adds an extra dimension”, Tervo describes her way of working.
      The girl who called Sauri remains unknown to Tervo. She said that it would be fantastic to meet her one day.
      “I was wondering if it was OK to use the tape. On the other hand the girl called a radio programme and chose to bring her pain into the public arena. She was being honest: she had no one else to call.”
     
The competition jury commended Lumikko for its style, which broke down the boundaries of different genres.
      The international jury consisted of one Finnish and four international film professionals, the most experienced one of whom was the festival organiser Philip Cheah, 51. In his view Lumikko excels in its multifacetedness.
      “A universal story about loneliness works on two levels: as a phone call to a radio help line, and also as images of the mental world of the girl who made the call.”
      Cheah did not think the film was particularly “Finnish”.
      “Only the snow and an elk remind the viewer that we’re in Finland. Plus I have heard that Pekka Sauri is Finland’s Howard Stern."
      What Sauri, who is also a Deputy Mayor of Helsinki and a former leading light of the Finnish Greens would say to being compared with the American "shock jock" is unclear.
      Cheah thought the level of the competition was good.
      “In the end the picking of the winner was easy. It has to be remembered that when planning this type of an event one must include two types of films: those aimed for the audience and those aimed for the critics.”


Previously in HS International Edition:
  New documentary follows lives of drug addicts in Rovaniemi (11.3.2010)

Links:
  Tampere Film Festival 2010

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