New Nordic Cinema at Scandinavia House returns in a virtual format! Celebrate contemporary Nordic filmmaking with us from home in week-long sessions of contemporary feature films and documentaries. The eighth session of the series from April 9 through 15 features the film Aalto (dir. Virpi Suutari; 2020, Finland), a documentary and love story of Finnish modern architecture/design masters Alvar and Aino Aalto, and an enchanting journey to their creations and influence around the world. Director Virpi Suutari will join us for a virtual film talk with Peter Reed (former Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, MoMA) in coordination with the screenings; please check back here for more details closer to the date.
Aalto tells the story of Alvar and Aino Aalto, a couple who shared their lives and great passion for the organic human-scale architecture. Together they worked to create a better and a more democratic modern world; in their philosophy, the “little human” was always in the center. In 1949, Alvar suffered the great tragedy of Aino’s death; he later married the architect Elissa Aalto, and experienced one of his most significant periods throughout the 1950s, continuing to work until he died in 1976.
The film shares for the first time Alvar and Aino’s intimate love story, highlighting Aino’s importance as an equal architect colleague and visionary designer, and takes us on a cinematic tour of their creative processes and iconic buildings, including a library in Russia, a student dormitory at MIT, an art collector’s private house near Paris, and a pavilion in Venice. Combining contemporary film material and rare unforeseen archives, Aalto dives into the colorful history of modernism, where we also meet the Rockefellers, Le Corbusier and László Moholy-Nagy, with narration both from the designers’ contemporaries and from researchers throughout the world. (102 min. In Finnish with English subtitles)
Festival films will be available to ticket holders all over the U.S. Each session is limited to 250 tickets in an effort to preserve the intimate and communal experience. The sessions will take place over seven days (Friday — Thursday), with all films available for viewing on a virtual cinema screening platform throughout this period. To download viewing instructions and an FAQ, please click here.