Lens Politica
Various venues, Helsinki, Finland
Still from The Yes Men fix the World (2009)
The fourth annual Lens Politica film and media art festival presented documentaries, fiction and short films from the Middle East, Cuba and Finland. The festival shed light on many current sociopolitical topics, discussing issues through three exhibitions and various discursive events around Helsinki. Alejandro Pedregal initiated Lens Politica with the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005, however, as the festival progressed, Pedregal set it up as an independent event, opening the festival up to discourses in film, media and politics.
Still from The Yes Men fix the World (2009)
This year’s festival was inaugurated with the film The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), in which the Yes Men once again work to expose market economy’s twisted logic and greedy motivations. The Kiasma theatre was packed with young academic enthusiasts; for many of them this was their first encounter with the gonzo group (whose self-branding efforts sometimes seem contradictory to their anti-corporate stunts and hoaxes). The Yes Men inspired the festival also to collaborate with Animalia Federation for the Protection of Animals in publishing Maaseudun Tulvaisuus newspaper – a faux newspaper was dated to 2025 and reporting only promising news such as closing down fur farming and aims at nuclear-power-free Finland.
The analysis on possibilities and diversity of media continued in a seminar hosted by artist/documentarist/curator Khaled Ramadan, who discussed ‘mocumenting’ as an alternative for the few dominating and controlling entities of information flow. Ramadan focused on the diversification of moving images in relation to the movement of people, which he sees generating aesthetics of alternative information and hence discussed the role of artists in challenging cultural norms and prejudices.
The reading of Jim Allen’s Perdition, a Play in Two Acts (1987) was one of the festival’s most significant initiatives. The play’s controversial history in the UK (when British Zionists succeeded in banning the play in London when it was commissioned for the Royal Court) was openly used as a marketing ploy for the reading of the event. The reading was conducted by Wedding Collective’s Stephen Tiller together with Corin Redgrave and a newly cast Finnish crew. Even though its narrative is set in 1944 with the trial of the Holocaust and Zionist movement in Hungary, Perdition … feels very current with its political concept analysis. The act of collaboration, territorial ambitions as well as the difference between co-operation and collaboration were discussed in detail in the tense court dialogues. Additionally the notions of doing all humanly possible and forms of resistance prevailed throughout the whole festival.
Still from American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (2009)
The festival ended with a portrait of the American Jewish nonconformist Norman Finkelstein, who also lectured at the University of Helsinki. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (2009) was originally supposed to discuss the actual Israel-Palestinian conflict but the filmmakers David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier turned their focus to the acts of the son of Holocaust survivors, critic of Israel and the US’s policy in the Middle East, and author of The Holocaust Industry (2001). American Radical follows Finkelstein’s tour around the world in his aims to debate questions of freedom, identity and nationhood.
Finkelstein’s lecture and screening were organized in collaboration with ICAHD Finland (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions). It seems to me that Finkelstein’s aims ‘to quicken the consciousnesses’ and critique of organized remembrance gave Lens Politica its core. Accordingly ICAHD’s efforts and Lens Politica’s context provided a needed platform for questioning Finland’s role as the second largest provider of missile technology to Israel.
With its fourth edition Lens Politica moved beyond the traditional left-wing/right-wing juxtaposition in outlining politics as processes and power relations between various social actors – individuals, groups and societies at large.
Aura Seikkula
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