Craving Earth
Anna-Sofia Nylund, Finland 2023
Language: Swedish
Subtitles: English

In the essay film Craving Earth, the filmmaker tries to explain the indescribable feeling one can have towards nature and its beauty. She starts making daily excursions in the forest to get closer to the subject. Her experiences raise questions about different approaches to nature. What makes you want “more of nature”? Is it possible to describe an experience of nature through eroticism? Is there such a thing as the inner essence of nature?

Production notes

Study the Stars Tonight
Blank cut-out address forms slide into the frame. A broken pair of sunglasses, small notebooks, a volunteer work journal – a mix of personal effects and junk is revealed piece by piece, sketching out their owner, a child from the 1940s. What can objects tell us about the past and what are the limits of that knowledge?

The film is an outline of a new form merging art and scholarship, focusing on the history of material culture, our notion of history and on the ways we use the past.

Production notes

This documentary will leave you pondering the nature of historical research and where its limits lie, but also what the contents of your own bag could reveal to the historians of the future. We hear the thoughts of young Tapani through essays found in his school bag, while the private thoughts and words of present day 13-year-olds remain hidden inside phones, behing PIN codes and fingerprint scanners. 

Sanni Myllyaho (translated by Virpi Sumu)