Helsinki film lovers and the death of a Montreal festival icon

A delight about my stay in Helsinki over the past week was that my hotel was located immediately across the street from perhaps that city’s only art house theatre Cinema Orion. The elegant theatre dates from 1928 and is run by a non-profit association. Between touring around the city and a one-day visit across the Baltic to Estonia I was able to get at least one screening in, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun) a, well, campy horror flic starring Gillian Anderson. Not really my cup of tea although it did have some funny moments and I’ve always had a crush on said Anderson, here with long flowing blond locks. Also on tap were Oasis: Don’t Look back in Anger (Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace) and Pedro Almodovar’s Autofiction. There was also a monthly series of classic Finnish films, with the first, Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988) drawing a throng lined up down the block. And no sooner did I leave the screening than someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a fellow Canuck, who’d overheard me tell the usher how great the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) was. Brynna was from Gimli MB and living in Helsinki three years, loving the place and agreeing with my very positive comments about the city from its calm urban character (little traffic, well planned parks and pedestrian and bike paths) to the sophisticated respectful Finnish people. By the way, the Helsinki Intl. Film Festival is coming up Sept. 17 – 27. If you’re going…

Very sad news that the founder of Montreal’s one-time great festival, Festival des films du monde,  Serge Losique has died. I attended the very first fest in 1977 (then rivalling Toronto’s, which started a year earlier) and was there for virtually every year since, regardless of where I lived in Canada. His cinematic biography traces to when he attended the Sorbonne in Paris where in the early 1960s, he rubbed shoulders with some of the greats of the French Nouvelle Vague especially Jean-Luc Godard. Back in Canada he was a major educator of cinema. The festival became hugely popular in Montreal and always ran in the 10 days prior to Labour Day, an end of summer big exclamation point. But in its last decade it fell on hard times, with allegations of financial mismanagement and sponsors withdrawing. In the last year I attended it lost a major multiplex and small theatres scrambled to reschedule films. Critics unrelentingly decried Losique for being a virtual dictator and creating a chaotic festival that was “uncurated” with titles simply acquired wherever he could get them. Its last year was 2019. 

And finally, when in Finland I stumbled upon one of the country’s major commercial cineplexes FinnKino and – wow. Not only was the lobby massive and high-end it featured wall-length self-serve glass-enclosed cabinets of prepared popcorn and hundreds of types of candy. Nothing like this in Canada!