Gremlins’ Dante joins festival guests in Finnish Lapland

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

13/06/2012 - US director, cinephile and horror-comedy specialist Joe Dante will join the international guests at the 27th Midnight Sun Film Festival , which opens today (June 13) at Sodankylä, a little town with 9,000 inhabitants, 35,000 reindeer and millions of mosquitoes, situated 120 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland.

Dante will introduce an extensive retrospective of his work, including his 1984 breakthrough Gremlins, the 1990 sequel, the Jaws parody Piranha (1978), the werewolf horror The Howling (1981), the Oscar-winning science fiction comedy Innerspace (1987) and the neighbourhood horror movie The ‘Burbs (1989), adding one of his own favourites, Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.

Festival director Peter von Bagh’s guest list for the event, which shows films around-the-clock (Midnight Sun, you know) till June 17, also includes Finland’s only Hollywood actress Taina Elg, Swedish actress Harriet Andersson, Hungarian director Béla Tarr, US cult director Alan Rudolph, Swedish directors Ruben Östlund, Axel Petersén and Portugese director Rodrigo Areias.

Besides a selection of last year’s top Finnish films, four local features will have their world premieres up North - two debuts, Matti Kinnunen’s Miss Blue Jeans, from Kauko Röyhkä’s novel about a young man growing up around 1970s new wave rock, and Jyri Kähönen’s thriller, Hush – Anything For Love, starring Martti Suosalo, as well as Jarmo Lampela’s Conversations Between Men and Rax Rinnekangas’ Watermark.