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2017 Meeting of the Nordic and Baltic Film Archives

The Nordic film archives had their annual meeting in Helsinki 6–8 September 2017. The Finnish custom has been to also invite the Baltic film archives, and invitations were sent to the archives in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Unfortunately, only Estonia replied and showed up.

The programme started with a film screening at KAVI’s cinema Orion in central Helsinki. The film was People in the Summer Night by Valentin Vaala (1948), subtitled in English for the occasion. A good number of Nordic archivists showed up, and some addtional ones joined in for after-film beers nearby. Deep analyses of the film and its gay undercurrent ensued.

The meeting proper started as per tradition with the presentations of the archives giving an overview of the current topics in each archive. Workshops followed, this year one on film scanning and the other on film programming. Both of these were quite practical, and the right people from the archives were present so real issues could be discussed. The workshop was quite useful at least for us hosts because we are in the process of getting a new high-performance file storage system to replace the old one which is about six years old already. It was very useful to hear real life experiences of different systems. Quite enthusiastic comments were also heard from the other group, at least they seemed to could have continued discussions for as long as the clock would permit them.

The meeting day was concluded by going to the anniversary party of The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture. It was very crowded so some smaller teams went on the town instead.

On the last day, as the icing on the cake, clips showing recent work at the archives were screened at Kino Tulio, the preview cinema at KAVI’s office premises. This is regarded by many the most fun part of the meetings, and quite entertaining it was, as well as educational.

Next year, it was decided to meet in Stockholm.

Mikko Kuutti