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FESTIVALS Finland

Helsinki’s Love & Anarchy celebrates its 30th birthday

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- Finland’s largest showcase is publishing a book and unspooling a series of festival classics plus its largest programme of more than 200 shorts

Helsinki’s Love & Anarchy celebrates its 30th birthday
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, which will open the festival

Celebrating its 30th birthday, the Helsinki International Film Festival: Love & Anarchy – Finland’s largest showcase – will launch this year’s programme today by publishing a book about the festival’s history and screening a series of festival classics at the National Audiovisual Institute’s Orion cinema. “Reading the book, one can only wonder how the festival’s founding members are still alive,” said the festival’s executive director, Anna Möttölä30 Years of Love and Anarchy was written by Finnish journalists Kalle Kinnunen and Laura Lehtinen.

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The festival classics include US director Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004), Chinese filmmaker John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992), and US directors Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), which all had their Finnish premieres at Love & Anarchy. Meanwhile, the Allas Sea Pool is inviting audiences for open-air screenings of such movies as Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Pedro Almodóvar
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]
 (2011), and US filmmakers Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2011) and Noah Baumbach’s Frances HA (2012). The Sea Pool adds to the nine Helsinki theatres servicing the festival. 

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Luca Guadagnino
film profile
]
 will be first on the anniversary schedule, while Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s The Square [+see also:
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interview: Ruben Östlund
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]
 – the winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival and Sweden’s candidate for the Oscar nomination for Best Foreign-language Film – will bring it to a close.

Finnish directors J-P Passi and Jukka Kärkkäinen’s The Punk Voyage [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, a documentary about Finnish punk band Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, whose members are disabled musicians, will have its world premiere in the Gala section. Danish actor Pilou Asbæk, who performs in Finnish director Arto Halonen’s upcoming feature The Guardian Angel [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, will receive the festival’s first Nordic Flair Award. Asbæk, who is also known for his roles in the US-UK TV series Game of Thrones and the Danish series Borgen, will be in the festival’s Spotlight.

Head of the Cannes International Film Festival Thierry Frémaux will introduce his documentary Lumière ! L’aventure commence [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, about the Lumière brothers, and US-Italian director Jonas Carpignano will be in Helsinki with his A Ciambra [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonas Carpignano
film profile
]
. Furthermore, Japanese director Naoko Ogigami is expected with her Kamome Diner. The festival will present three films opposing Russian censorship: Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrey Zvyagintsev
film profile
]
Kantemir Balagov’s Closeness [+see also:
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]
 and Sergei Loznitsa’s Cannes entry A Gentle Creature [+see also:
film review
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interview: Sergei Loznitsa
film profile
]
, following a woman desperately trying to find her husband in the Russian prison system.

British cinema is represented by Sally Potter’s The Party [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Sally Potter
film profile
]
, and French by François Ozon’s Cannes entry The Double Lover [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
. Chinese director Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow [+see also:
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]
 arrives directly from its three wins at Venice, where British director Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [+see also:
film review
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]
was also competing.

Organised for the first time, Cut to the Chase – L&A Shorts will screen more than 200 short films across 34 categories, including local productions – such as Finnish director Teppo Airaksinen’s Cannes winner The Ceiling – plus retrospectives of the works of Finnish director Rosa Liksom and Swedish filmmaker Amanda Kernell.

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