Aho & Soldan Award 2010: KITI LUOSTARINEN

Whether dealing with her own life phases or the realities of other people, Kiti Luostarinen crafts her films with the principle the deeper you delve into the private, the more universal the truths you will find. She does not merely observe, but boldly steps inside the story to experience and narrate. She is an open-minded visionary, an experiencer recording her thoughts and feelings with accuracy, and a skilled storyteller.

This results in films on to which everyone can reflect their own lives. The stories give the audience a chance to shed light on the maze of their own consciousness, to recognise their own emotions; to journey into their own childhood (Tell Me What You Saw , 1992), to penetrate into their own body (Gracious Curves, 1997) or to look their own death in the eye (The Face of Death, 2003).

Kiti Luostarinen has never studied filmmaking. Her mother’s bar and hostel in the Riihimäki of her childhood, and her research after studying social psychology and educational science at the University of Helsinki, sparked this already inquisitive woman’s interest in different people’s realities and gave rise to a desire to understand the state of her own psyche. In the solitary moments of her youth, she found comfort in literature, especially in poetry. Alongside reading, she created paintings and pictures to which film seemed a natural continuation. Kiti Luostarinen is equally in her own element and true to herself whether she is working as a German-speaking guide in Italy or looking for mushrooms in a Finnish forest with her friends from the Martha home economics organisation. She adapts quickly to new situations and gets on well with all kinds of people, and is an uncompromisingly individual observer, which makes her well-suited to working as a scriptwriter-director.

Far from being sensationalistic or bizarre, Kiti Luostarinen’s films penetrate deeper than reality. They crouch down to explore the essential issues of life. Her patient and all-round positive attitude toward everything she embarks on nurtures unhurriedly developing film sprouts, as if they were living creatures that cannot be forced or rushed. They, as all creative work, have their own pace, they beat according to their own pulse; move forward and stop, then proceed again. They take their own time to ripen, since their maker is able to breathe in harmony with the universe. Because of this, there is always space for the invisible and time for the unexpected during the filming. When the story is carefully defined and yet left open enough, an atmosphere of safety and trust lends wings to the filmmaking. This can be so powerful that the filmmaker can, for a while, forget about the narrative – past and future – and take hold of the present and write a diary entry like Kiti in her film The Face of Death: “Why think about the afterlife when you can live in the moment? Being human is enough.”

Kiti Luostarinen is a human and a filmmaker in such extraordinary harmony that it is impossible to take the two apart. There are no walls, bulwarks or professional gimmickry between her life and work. The art of films means style at the most superficial level, form at a slightly deeper level, but at its finest, as in Kiti’s case, it is a lifestyle etched deeply on skin, a lifestyle that is not afraid to stop humbly even at a frail breath.

At the place where word, picture and soul reside.

Kristina Haataja
Translator, Author

Translation by Anna Volmari