Sodankylä Forever is both a personal document and a diary created by the director of one festival, myself, yet hopefully it is also a reflection about film festivals in general: what are they all about? The Midnight Sun Film Festival was created 25 years ago by three directors – Aki and Mika Kaurismäki, Anssi Mänttäri – who invented the astounding idea of holding a film festival literally nowhere – in a small village called Sodankylä, 120 kilo- meters north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. One key element was there from the beginning: a two-hour morning discussion between me and each of the principal guest filmmakers, without interference from the audience or the press. That meant a certain concentration and an important duration in contrast to the hectic and faked entertainment pace of many other festivals. Some have claimed that the morning discussions were sometimes like psychoanalytical sessions.

All of these discussions were filmed, and so the idea of a montage came early. Yet nothing happened for years as I just didn’t know how to do it. The solution was to abandon all chronology and to construct some kind of heavenly dialogue (given that so many of those filmed are not with us any more) between the guests throughout the history of the festival, between the light of film (as Aki Kaurismäki says, film is light, digital is electronics) and nature, magically present in mid-June, when films are presented all day and all night, and spectators face the sun whenever they come out of the cinema, even at three in the morning.

I hardly understood the dimensions of the task before the long work of editing commenced (resulting in four separate films, four and a half hours in all) and when the “wisdom of montage” started its independent dictation: the festival as a network of emotions, secret connections, words and communications that are not only about the moment but are also charged with history, connected by the solidarity among filmmakers, reflecting the beauty and seriousness of the profession that I respect more than ever now. The directors, arguably the greatest concentration of filmmakers’ voices in one movie, appear as humans and artists who don’t talk about the usual film festival trivialities. They are artist-citizens, whose personal histories contribute to a great and unique emotional synthesis: between film, the presence of filmmakers and the attentive audience – indicating what a miracle a film festival can be.

Peter von Bagh