VIVISECTfest 03: Film

Pirjo Honkasalo

The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

Director:	Pirjo Honkasalo
Country of production:	Finland
Year of production:	2004
Duration:	85 min
Script:	Pirjo Honkasalo
Cinematography:	Pirjo Honkasalo
Sound:	Martti Turunen, Mart Otsa
Music:	Sana Salmenkalio
Editing:	Nils Pag Andersen, Pirjo Honkasalo
Production:	Kristina Pervila / Millenium Film
Co-Producer:	Pirjo Honkasalo / Baabeli

Film plot

The Chechen war is the setting for the film. The inability of adults to resolve the war gives rise to a generation upon whom hatred has been visited like the issue of a deity incarnate. Children have taken on a burden of hatred which they believe springs from within. The transposed hatred casts a pall to the depths of their minds; they are accompanied throughout their lives by an inexplicable melancholia and sudden outbursts of rage.

I am filming Russian children on Kronstadt, an island that lies before St. Petersburg. They are being trained in the Kronstadt cadet academy as child soldiers. The imagined enemy is the Chechen. He is the foe whose utter defeat turns a soldier into a hero of the fatherland.

I am filming Chechen children in Ingushetia, in the family of Xhadizhat Gataeva, which now consists of 75 orphans for whom Xhadizhat has vowed to act as mother. She has brought them together from the ruins of a devastated Grozny. All of their parents were killed by the Russians.

Awards & Prizes

Mostra Intrenazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, Venice, Italy (2004); The Human Rights Film Network Award; The Lina Mangiacapre Award; EIUC Special Mention;
cph:dox Documentary Film Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark (2004) - First Prize (shared); IDFA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2004) - Amnesty International’s Doen Award; Jussi Awards 2004, (2005) - Best Documentary Film and Best Music (Sanna Salmenkallio); Zagreb Dox International Documentary Film Festival (2005) - Grand Prix; 8th Annual Documentary and Short Film Festival Vera, Åland, Finland (2005) - Vera Prize; Tampere International Short Film Festival (2005) - Main Prize in Finnish Competition, over 30 minutes; 20. Festival Internacional de Cine del Mar del Plata (2005) - ACTA Prize by Signis Fuena Prize "Visión Artistica"; Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Images of the 21st Century, Greece (2005) - FIPRESCI Award; Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, NC, USA (2005) - Seeds of War Award; DocAviv – Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, Israel (2005) - Special Mention in category Best International Film; Chicago International Documentary Festival (2005) - Arie & Bozena Zweig Innovation Award; One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Prague, Czech Republic (2005) - Best Director Award; 19th Pärnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival, Estonia (2005) - Grand Prix; Golden Apricot International Film Festival, Yerevan, Armenia (2005) - Grand Prix Golden Apricot for Best Documentary Film; ANONIMUL International Film Festival, Romania (2005) - Special Mention for Documentary Film; VII Festival Internacional De Cine y Video / Derechos Humanos, DerHumALC, Santiago del Estero, Argentine (2005) - First Prize / Documentaries; State Quality Award (2005); 57. Prix Italia, Milan, Italy (2005) - Prix Italia TV Documentaries – Current Affairs; Eurodok Award 2006.

Pirjo Honkasalo has directed, written and worked as a cinematographer for documentaries and feature films for over 25 years. Ms. Honkasalo was born in Helsinki in 1947. She entered film school at the age of 17 and completed her cinematographic thesis at the age of 21. In the same year she shot her first full-length film. She continued to study and worked as an assistant at the Temple University in Philadelphia. Her first major directing role, the historical drama film Tulipää (Flame Top), was chosen for the Cannes Official Selection series in 1980.
As a documentarian, she is best known for her trilogy The Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic, the final part of which, Atman, won the Joris Ivens prize in Amsterdam in 1996.

Her latest drama film, Tulennielijä (The Fire-Eater), won the AFI (American Film Institute) Grand Prix Festival in Los Angeles in 1998

Director's Statement

The personal point of departure:
Having completed my "Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic" (the full-length documentary films Mysterion, Tanjuska and the 7 Devils, and Atman), I felt I had purged myself of what I had sought from the documentary film: its purifying and implacable concreteness. I had given whatever I had to give; to that concretion, an intimation of human silence.

I felt an attraction and attachment to the logic of the dream, to which the fictional film provides the most natural path. The world of the dream is half in the past, half in the future. Its gods swing back and forth between life and death. There is no sense of longing in dreams. Time in dreams is not time in time. I directed the feature film "Fire-Eater".

I have always been stimulated not only by the Sacred and Satanic, but also by the Poetic and Political. It was this that drew me back to the documentary.

I don't care for truths, for I see all thought as roiling foam that adheres to nothing nor holds fast; but in the time when I am not asleep or dreaming, I wish to know how the human tribe leads its life, shapes its history and expresses its will, which always seeks to improve the human condition and yet wallows, bewildered, in its blood like some elk gone astray in the city and impaled on the spikes of a cemetery fence. It should not happen this way.

Europe is filled with people who need grace of some kind to cope with their righteous rage. The righteous rage turns, a reflection, against them. And life is no court of justice; justice does not prevail, life does. It rises out of chaos in an ascending spiral, briefly appears to have structure, and descends in the curve of a downward spiral toward fresh chaos.