Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Missä on missä?

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Kati Outinen, Tommi Korpela

Where is Where? is an experimental film that quarters the screen in order to have four different scenes play simultaneously. It's a meditation on the Algerian war that culminates in a brutal killing.

Rakkaus on aarre

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Heikki Putro, Minna Pehkonen

Love Is a Treasure is a 55-minute film about the world of women who have developed psychoses. It consists of five episodes each telling the story of one woman. The episodes are based research and interviews but the stories and dialogue are fiction, combinations of different elements. —The Cinematic Works of Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Me/We

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

ME/WE, OKAY, and GRAY consists of a short three-episode film and a 3-monitor installation. The installation is intended for showing in museums and galleries, and the episodes of the film version in cinemas among trailers and between the adverts on television. ME/WE is about balancing individual identity and about control. In an absurd episode a nuclear family of four is in the backyard hanging out white sheets to dry. The story is told via a monologue by the father. He mirrors himself and his life in the members of his family, seeing himself at moments when he recognises differences and similarities. Darkness falls – the sheets glow in the night like blank white screens. The father directs his words to viewers. His voice also speaks the other characters’ lines, with the others opening and closing their mouths in the appropriate rhythms. Who in the end is speaking, what is an individual and where are the boundaries of the self?

Tänään

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Tänään consists of three short polemical episodes. The subject matter in the episodes is the relationship between father and daughter. In a summer night grandfather dies in an accident. The event is viewed through three different characters... The objective has been to... explore the possibilities of technical means in expressing subject matter, and nevertheless to maintain the relevancy of the work to larger audiences.

Jos 6 olis 9

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

If 6 was 9 tells a story about girls and sex. It shows a point of view to the sexual fantasies, habits, actions and wishes of teenage girls. The film shows the metamorphosis of five young women to a sexual being with the softest organs for taking and grasping. They move from inside and they want to have the world and touch it with their feet, cheeks, tits and arse.

Lohdutusseremonia

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Consolation Service follows a young Finnish couple, Anni and J-P, as they make public their decision to divorce. It is set in early spring in Helsinki, with its frozen landscape on the cusp of thawing.

Gray

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

The films are situated, both formally and narratively, in the terrain between short fiction and advertisements. They examine the differences and interactions between the two: the effects of the moving-image tradition and the language of film on advertising; and the use of narrative strategies and means of expression from adverts in drama. The subject of GRAY is the change in reality caused by a catastrophe, and the blurring of the boundary between self and other. It deals with a situation in which the other cannot be excluded, because it is in the very air that is breathed. Three women talk about a nuclear disaster that has occurred beyond the national borders. Their speech is allusive, including both facts about nuclear accidents and private thoughts. The women descend in a freight elevator to a dark, underwater place. The change, whether caused by fallout from a nuclear accident or the invasion of a foreign language and customs is permanent.

Okay

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

ME/WE, OKAY, and GRAY consists of a short three-episode film and a 3-monitor installation. The installation is intended for showing in museums and galleries, and the episodes of the film version in cinemas among trailers and between the adverts on television. OKAY uses a single on-screen persona and various voices to consider the shifts, desires, and inhibitions of the self in a sexual relationship. Only one actor appears on screen, but her voice changes as the story progresses. The different voices are both male and female. The story is told in the first person. The new voice carries on the story and implants a new persona into the picture. The ‘individuality’ of the main character on screen dissolves and the physical self-evidentness of gender is cast into doubt through the collision of visual and aural information.

The Annunciation

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Satu Mäkinen, Elise Laaksonen

This charming and casually reverent work is an authorized single-screen version of an installation by celebrated video artist Ahtila. Amid stunning snow-draped forests, a women’s theatrical group rehearses a stage version of the Annunciation (the director is played by Aki Kaurismäki’s signature actress Kati Outinen), in the process discovering the parallel worlds of humans and animals, and the proximity of the ordinary to the miraculous.