Sodankylä posters II

I had a few more poster-related photos left from Sodankylä, best to put them up too I guess.

The first photo above shows the window of Sodankylä's only permanent movie theatre, Lapinsuu, filled with festival posters. Usually we were supposed to remove the posters as soon as the showings were done, but the full window does look nice in my opinion. I only got to see one screening in Lapinsuu, though: Io sono l'amore. That was quite good. And with stylish title typography.

Another place where the posters were posted was in the fences around the festival area. The photo above is by the entrance to the food & beer tent.

This was our workspace. It was at the end of the festival office corridor, so we had a lot of people come in and ask for the office that they had just passed on the way to our tables. Perhaps we should have made some signs showing the office door.

Above is a small sign made for the doorway of a temporary cinema (which used to be the indoor sporting hall of a school).

And last is a view from the shore beside the festival HQ. It's not quite the midnight sun, but close. The photo was taken 15 minutes before midnight.

Posters from Sodankylä film festival

As I mentioned in the previous post, I went to Sodankylä Film Festival this year to make posters. My friend had asked me at least twice previously, but due to the day job and my bad planning-ahead-skills I had not managed to go before. This year I finally did manage to go there and it was definitely a very nice week.

The film festival has a tradition of hand-made posters, maybe even dating back to when the festival was first started 25 years ago. Every day there are some selected showings that need posters done. We usually were warned a few hours in advance, sometimes even the previous day, about which films posters were needed for, and what extra info there might be. Aside from the posters, we also made signage and other lettering.

Everything is done by hand and copy machines, I did bring my laptop along but we only used it for reference. It was very refreshing to work just by hand, since the computer easily becomes the default tool for everything. I did cheat a bit by drawing smaller and enlarging with the copy machine, but I suppose it's analog enough.

This was the first year there was a dedicated poster/graphics team. Besides making the posters, we also went to glue them around the town (which is quite small). The work was nicely paced, there was time to go to see the films also. Apparently the visiting directors also appreciate the custom posters and I heard some of them had asked copies for themselves. That is of course the best feedback a poster artist could get.

The festival itself was great, worth the 15-hour drive (I did have some friends with driving licenses along). As I said, the town is very small, so there's not that much to do besides see movies. It does get quite packed with everyone from the south coming over for the week. There's also a strange feeling of timelessness with the sun being above the horizon all the time, sometimes it's hard to guess the time of day. Most likely we'll return next year for more niceness.

The first image (above) is a detail of a silent film concert poster (3 Chaplin's short films). I heard the conductor had asked for a copy of the poster. Below is the whole poster.

Second poster is for Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti western For A Few Dollars More. Mr. Leone obviously wasn't a guest in the festival.

The third poster if for an Italian film by Pietro Marcello, which sounded interesting but that I didn't manage to see unfortunately. The director had also asked for a copy which was nice.

I might have some more lettering photos from the festival somewhere, maybe for the next post.

My girlfriend made some very nice posters too.

Film festival official pages.