Blush – An Extraordinary Voyage
Iiti Yli-Harja, Finland 2023
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English

For 18-year-old Finnish–Kosovan Fatu, a simple visit to the grocery store feels as nerve-racking as a lunar expedition: for the first time in his life, he’s wearing makeup in public. Luckily his best friend Rai, a young woman on the spectrum of autism, is there to ferociously support him through the voyage.

Production notes

Track Two
A newspaper clip of a 30-year-old movie makes our middle-aged protagonist in the middle of his peak years to look for his best childhood friend. The journey leads him back to his teenage years in the 1990s depression, over-generational substance abuse and past encounters.

This partly essayistic, autobiographical documentary tells the story of friendship and generational experiences while also pondering on the causes and effects of destinies in the judgmental atmosphere of our society.

Production notes

Antti Lempiäinen’s Track Two is a personal and partially essayistic depiction of friendship and yearning, a society that puts people in boxes, and the intergenerational legacy of substance abuse. The story of two friends living opposite lives demonstrates the significance of the cards we are dealt in the beginning of our lives. How many of the choices we make are actually ours, and how many are defined from the outside?

The director’s own narration guides us through the story, to which many can relate. Our roads often part at the brink of adulthood. Every one of us knows someone, whose life has fallen to pieces. Before all, Track Two is a story of the choices that we make and the circumstances which define us, possibly more than we would like.

Vilma-Lotta Mustonen (translated by Inari Ylinen)

Antti Lempiäinen, the director of Track Two is present in the screening on Thu, Feb 2.