When filmmaker Elina Talvensaari moves into a new apartment in Helsinki, it still contains all the previous occupant’s personal belongings. The old lady died with nobody left to miss her, or to deal with her possessions. The filmmaker begins to investigate who she was. Through the diaries, letters and 8mm films she finds in the apartment, the long life of an unknown woman unfolds. This poetic, meditative documentary raises questions about what gives human life meaning, how does it live on after a person’s death, and whose story is worthy of a film

biografia

Elina Talvensaari (b.1978) is an anthropologist-turned-filmmaker from Helsinki, Finland. She is deeply in love with images, but the background in anthropology is often present in her films as a distant gaze questioning our own thoughts and habits. “Documentary film is an amazing tool to combine the ordinary and the poetic, to see what is left unseen in everyday life.” Some of Talvensaari’s short films have been shown in art galleries and museums as well. But it is creative documentary film that is the closest and most dear way of dealing with the world for her.

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