Directed by Matleena Jänis
When Finnish director Matleena Jänis’s mother passed away, among her belongings she found a stack of nostalgic home movies filmed by three generations at a lakeside summer cabin. The 8-mm home movies were not only crucial in helping Janis deal with her grief, they prompted her to study intergenerational issues and representations of the past: what and how we remember, and how we tell those stories. In her short film Memoriam / Islanders, Jänis creates a temporal utopia where the past and the present co-exist simultaneously, where the meanings connected to water and lake landscapes manifest themselves in the stream of life, death, and memory. The seamless combination of found footage with new live action and animation creates a film of incredible emotional range and aesthetic beauty, full of humour and poignancy.
Matleena Jänis works as a filmmaker and photographic artist in Finland. She has directed, written, shot, and edited several award-winning documentaries, shorts, and animated films that have been broadcast on television and screened in international film festivals, and her photographic work has been featured in exhibitions and published in books. Jänis holds academic degrees in both film and photography and in social and cultural anthropology, and she has also worked with researchers in cultural studies on several inter disciplinary projects bridging art and science. Jänis’s work has a distinctive, rich style and is filled with warm-hearted humour, which she uses to explore subjects such as memory, cultural history, transgenerationalism, imaginary worlds and religion.
