The Films of Ilkka Järvi-Laturi, with Steve Macfarlane and Hannu Björkbacka

The Film Comment Podcast

The Finnish filmmaker Ilkka Järvi-Laturi, subject of an ongoing retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, made only three features in his life, each of which is maverick in its own right. His 1989 debut, Homebound, is a gritty realist film about a young man struggling to escape a cycle of violence; City Unplugged sets a heist in the wake of Estonia’s independence in the 1990s. And History Is Made at Night, the strangest of the bunch, is an international, star-studded spy-thriller-slash-screwball-comedy set between New York City and Helsinki. The films together represent a unique creative vision—one that combines genre ambitions with a defiantly indie sensibility and unexpected sense of humor. To learn more about Järvi-Laturi’s career, Film Comment editors Clinton Krute and Devika Girish invited Steve Macfarlane, one of the curators of the MoMA retrospective, and Hannu Björkbacka, a Finnish critic, to the join Podcast. And if you live in New York, don’t miss the screenings this week at MoMA.