My Home by Azar Saiyar selected to Berlinale
The festival announced more titles as its opening day on February 10 is coming closer. Festival screenings will take place in cinemas but EFM is moving online.
Azar Saiyar’s short film My Home (2022) was selected for the Forum Expanded strand of the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival. Forum Expanded is a section independently curated and organised by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art as part of the Berlinale.
In My Home, fragmented memories of childhood and adulthood blend together in a song that an unknown narrator is humming. The film goes through various archives, both personal and public, from different times and from different moments of life. These ingredients do not build a single coherent narrative, one pure argument, a continuously developing story of growth, nor a piece that is solely a person’s own.
Azar Saiyar is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist whose art has been shown at film and media art festivals (e.g. DOK Leipzig, Uppsala SFF, IFF Message to Man, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin), galleries, exhibitions, museums and on television. My Home is distributed by AV-arkki.
In recent years, Forum Expanded has selected several films and works from Finnish artists, such as Jonna Kina, Laura Horelli, Mika Taanila and Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
Another Finnish film in the Berlinale program this year is the feature drama Girl Picture, from director Alli Haapasalo and scriptwriters Daniela Hakulinen and Ilona Ahti. The film is competing in the Generation 14plus section. Earlier this week, the festival announced that it would organize cinema screenings with reduced capasity and other safety measures. European Film Market, however, will move online.