Event

Helsinki, Forever

(Peter von Bagh, Finland, 2009, DigiBeta, 75 min)

Cities have long been a fetish of the cinema, from the early expressionist urban symphonies to the recent surge in metropolitan portraits like Terence Davies' Of Time and the City. Peter von Bagh, a distinguished film critic, historian and one-time director of the Finnish film archive, brings his wealth of knowledge and infectious cinephilia to Helsinki, Forever. It's a charming tribute to the city, whose character and cartography are rendered through a captivating array of visual and audio references. Using clips from both well-known and obscure Finnish filmmakers (from Teuvo Tulio to Aki Kaurismaki), von Bagh's "fabulous and rather Markeresque documentary..is a lovely city symphony which is also a history of Helsinki (and incidentally, Finland, Finnish cinema, and Finnish pop music)" (Jonathan Rosenbaum).