PRECARIOUS LANDSCAPES:
The Personal Cinema of Sami van Ingen
TICKETS: https://www.millenniumfilm.org/event-details/sami-van-ingen-precarious-l...
Friday, November 14, 2025
Doors 7:30 PM Films 8:00 PM
MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP
167 Wilson Ave, Brooklyn, NY
ONLINE:
8:00 PM EST
https://millenniumfilm.org/workshop-channel/
Millennium Film Workshop is is pleased to to invite esteemed filmmaker and curator Sami van Ingen from Finland to New York to showcase a selection of works spanning three decades. These works, depicting terrains where battles of thought, memories and actions take place, were chosen specially for this program by Sami for the connection he feels they have to the United States, in one way or nother. The films in this program are primarily re-appropriated footage, splintered through stroboscopic editing, otherwise distorted, dismantled, and even destroyed, transmuting from their images and meanings from without to within in the process.
In Sami's words,
"Terrain is the lay of the land, the general state of affairs, or circumstances of a situation. The circumstances in the United States of America, be it the cultural, the political or the economic are for a European citizen and artist like myself intriguing and unavoidably influential. With this selection of seven short experimental films, I want to recognize the impact US art (and artists) has had on my own work, and at the same time I wish to look at the aspects of resistance in my work that this impact has brought with it."
After the films, Sami will be in conversation with filmmaker and scholar Hamidreza Nassiri.
FILMS:
HAMMU 10 Minutes, silent 1991
Hammu is the name of the hamster I had as a child. It seemed it was my only friend and being to identify with. One day it disappeared from the cage and was never to be seen again; that marked the end of my childhood, of unreserved trust and commitment.
DEEP SIX 7 Minutes 2007
Deep Six has three starting points: a little narrative re-edited from a Hollywood B-film (The Rage, 1998), an attempt to use the color photocopy as a cinematic aesthetic and to explore the frame line as a dynamic visual element.
EXACTLY 8 Minutes 2008
Exactly is a piece of rearranged found footage and a reunited original sound track. By omitting just the name of the hero I have turned this recycled strip of film (cut from a 35mm print into a 16mm leader by an unanimous lab years ago- thus the undulation of images) in to three contemplations on consumerism.
STAGECOACH 6 Minutes 2010
Wheels where paramount in the conquering of the west, they made possible the transporting of building materials to build towns and cities. Wheels – now in the form of the private automobile – have
become a symbol of freedom and the last way to conquer “the big outdoors”. However, getting out of ones the car has got more difficult and much scarier.
HATE 12 Minutes, silent 2012
In 1959, Soviet film director Aleksandr Ptushko (1900–1973) directed a feature film called Sampo, which was loosely based on the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Parts of Sampo were filmed with two
cameras simultaneously. In Hate, I generate a stereographic image from these two separate, but simultaneously captured images to form a “happening” between the different perspectives. In this
work, I am interested in the possibility of exposing the hidden landscape of the mythical Kalevala for scrutiny and through this to open up questions over the way the other is portrayed and implicated in Ptushko ́s depiction of Kalevala. "
MANIFEST DESTINY 6 Minutes 2016
Chance incidents of life and those in the darkroom collide, as found footage filmstrips take new shape under a wavering flashlight. Poetic gestures in the source material and the manipulative body movements of the filmmaker form a new take on depicted relationships, a rite of passage and the artefacts of the process itself. As always, gestures become actions, and these determine how we live our lives.
FLAME 15 Minutes 2018
A fractured melodrama, based on damaged frames from the last minutes of the only remaining nitrate reel of the lost feature film Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) directed by Teuvo Tulio. All screening prints and the negative of the film were destroyed in a 1959 studio fire. A sequence from the middle of the film was found at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2015.
Precarious Landscapes is organized by Hamidreza Nassiri and Executive Director Joe Wakeman for Millennium Film Workshop. The Personal Cinema Series is supported in part by a grant from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.