Peter von Bagh

Acclaimed Finnish director Rauni Mollberg made several scandalous yet widely appreciated films. Former co-worker Veikko Aaltonen’s eye-opening documentary The Dinosaur looks at the relentless, often disturbing directing techniques behind Mollberg’s art and success.

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THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE is dedicated to filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s longtime friend and collaborator, the film critic and festival programmer Peter von Bagh. In this new video essay, filmmaker Daniel Raim explores Kaurismäki’s oeuvre through the world of von Bagh.

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Piirainen's documentary on the last years of Peter von Bagh.

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Documentary about Finnish film theaters - about their past, disappearance and future. And at the same time universal story how cinema is undeniably connected with life.

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After being struggling to finish his ninth book, an irrelevant author decides to try change his methods.

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This short document tells the story of Bank of Finland and the history of money in Finland.

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Peter von Bagh's documentary about Juhani Aho and people around him.

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The Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle — where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter von Bagh in 1985, the festival has played host to an international who’s who of directors and each day begins with a two-hour discussion. To mark the festival’s silver anniversary, festival director Peter von Bagh edited together highlights from these dialogues to create an epic four-part choral history of cinema drawn from the anecdotes, insights, and wisdom of his all-star cast: Coppola, Fuller, Forman, Chabrol, Corman, Demy, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Varda, Oliveira, Erice, Rouch, Gilliam, Jancso — and 64 more. Ranging across innumerable topics (war, censorship, movie stars, formative influences, America, neorealism) these voices, many now passed away, engage in a personal dialogue across the years that’s by turns charming, profound, hilarious and moving.

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Helsinki, Forever is a montage film about the city of Helsinki by the award-winning Finnish film director and academic Peter von Bagh. The film draws a portrait of Helsinki and also acts as an essay on Finnish culture in a wider sense. It shows Helsinki as captured by leading Finnish feature film and documentary makers over a period of one hundred years.

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Arriving in Helsinki, a nameless man is beaten within an inch of his life by thugs, miraculously recovering only to find that he has completely lost his memory. Back on the streets, he attempts to begin again from zero, befriending a moody dog and becoming besotted with a Salvation Army volunteer.

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Aki Kaurismäki, the celebrated Finnish filmmaker behind The Man Without a Past (Grand Prix du Jury, Cannes Film Festival 2002) and landmark works including Ariel, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, and Drifting Clouds, is the focus of AKI KAURISMÄKI, the latest release in the Cinema, of Our Time series. The younger half of Finland’s most prolific and irreverent filmmaking partnership, Kaurismäki, alongside his brother Mika Kaurismäki, was instrumental in shaping what became known as the New Finnish Cinema. Since 1981, he has directed twenty-two films, many of which are featured through excerpts in this documentary.

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A farmer's wife is seduced into running away from her stolid older husband by a city slicker, who enslaves her in a brothel.

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The ever-poker-faced Ilona loses her job as a restaurant hostess, as her tram driver husband, Lauri, also finds himself out of work. Together they must hit the streets of Helsinki, facing up to hardship and humiliation in their quest for survival, guided through the gloom by a ray of hope.

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Jonathan Ross interviews the inscrutable Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki at The Midnight Sun Film Festival during the release of 'The Match Factory Girl' along with comments from friends, colleagues and fans including highlights from his previous films.

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Portrait of a national icon: iskelmä or popular schlager legend Olavi Virta (1915–1972), as an old, lost and lonely man. When the film was screened for the first time, people all over Finland went ballistic – they couldn't take the sad sight of their tango's greatest voice, the incarnation of postwar wealth and glory in ruins.

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Pertti Ylermi Lindgren was engaged to 76 women, married none, but took the money of all. Lindgren is the real thing, as far as swindlers go. Peter von Bagh asked him to play himself in a film that would reconstruct some of his greatest moments, i.e. the most flamboyant stunts – and he agreed.

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An Italian mondo documentary about Finland. Among other things, it showcases intricacies of local mating culture, sports, Midsummer festivities and sauna.

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Peter von Bagh takes us on a trip to his homeland and Oulu, a small Finnish town, tracing the turbulent changes it has undergone in the 20th century. A life of the filmmaker, a history of his home and a history of cinema intersect in this magical film that works like a time machine. (text: International FIlm Festival Rotterdam

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An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

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The Midnight Sun Film Festival is held every June in the Finnish village of Sodankylä beyond the arctic circle — where the sun never sets. Founded by Aki and Mika Kaurismäki along with Anssi Mänttäri and Peter von Bagh in 1985, the festival has played host to an international who’s who of directors and each day begins with a two-hour discussion. To mark the festival’s silver anniversary, festival director Peter von Bagh edited together highlights from these dialogues to create an epic four-part choral history of cinema drawn from the anecdotes, insights, and wisdom of his all-star cast: Coppola, Fuller, Forman, Chabrol, Corman, Demy, Kieslowski, Kiarostami, Varda, Oliveira, Erice, Rouch, Gilliam, Jancso — and 64 more. Ranging across innumerable topics (war, censorship, movie stars, formative influences, America, neorealism) these voices, many now passed away, engage in a personal dialogue across the years that’s by turns charming, profound, hilarious and moving.

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Helsinki, Forever is a montage film about the city of Helsinki by the award-winning Finnish film director and academic Peter von Bagh. The film draws a portrait of Helsinki and also acts as an essay on Finnish culture in a wider sense. It shows Helsinki as captured by leading Finnish feature film and documentary makers over a period of one hundred years.

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An exemplary reconstruction of a historical turning point. Time and again, the images and the remembered stories.

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A documentary about Tapio Rautavaara, a traveler and artist. "The purpose of the film Tapsa was to reflect Rautavaara as a person. He himself gave the keys to it as a character. It is tinted accordingly. Any kind of film could have been made from the material. It could have been made on a completely grave scale or just full of jokes. But it is probably faithful to Rautavaara as it is."

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A psychotherapist's life is wrecked when her private life is exposed in a sensation magazine.

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Portrait of a national icon: iskelmä or popular schlager legend Olavi Virta (1915–1972), as an old, lost and lonely man. When the film was screened for the first time, people all over Finland went ballistic – they couldn't take the sad sight of their tango's greatest voice, the incarnation of postwar wealth and glory in ruins.

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Pertti Ylermi Lindgren was engaged to 76 women, married none, but took the money of all. Lindgren is the real thing, as far as swindlers go. Peter von Bagh asked him to play himself in a film that would reconstruct some of his greatest moments, i.e. the most flamboyant stunts – and he agreed.

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Two men and a woman, all rallye drivers, get too closely involved, competing in the race and in love.

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Young photography model Susanna and her alienated teenage brother Veli spend the summer of 1969 travelling around Finland, mostly with another girl and her boyfriend. Sporting the latest fashions and trendy hairdos, they naïvely observe and criticise the modern consumer society, advertising, fancy boats and summer cottages, country dances, barbecues, and any other phenomena that were supposed to bother angry young intellectuals in those days. The plot and the political agenda are delivered with a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary observations, fake TV commercials, fake interviews, philosophical voiceovers and titles, and a jazzy soundtrack by the progressive rock group Wigwam.

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In the year 2012 historian Raimo Lappalainen wants to illustrate how life was 50 years earlier. He becomes obsessed with the fate of a 1970s nude model Saara Turunen, and finds a perfect actress to reconstruct her life and death in front of a TV camera. Meanwhile, a strike at a nuclear plant is covered up by the media.

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Recollections of a Helsinki Bourgeois

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It took a dozen years, but in 1952 the greatest dream of sports-crazy Finland finally came true: The Helsinki Olympics happened.

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