- 2027
- Working title
- Unexplored Region
- Running time
- 60–70 min
- Format
- 16 mm, colour and black and white
- Languages
- vienankarjala, Spanish, Finnish
- Territory
- Finland
Unexplored Region
Región inexplorada · tutkimatoin aloveh
A film about learning vienankarjala, Viena Karelian, one of the three dialects of the Karelian language, spoken on both sides of the Finnish–Russian border. The film follows that learning not as documentation but as a way of living inside the language. The title comes from an inscription on a map that appears in Iván Z, his first film, shot two decades earlier. Between the two there is also a turn in the material: where that one celebrated the digital, this one takes on celluloid and a wind-up Bolex.
The film is shot on celluloid. Not as a position on film versus digital, but because a language being safeguarded deserves a carrier that lasts longer than a hard drive: the aim is a photochemical record of Karelian that will still be readable in a hundred years.
Its working framework, an immigrant aesthetics, treats identity as a tonality rather than a border, and takes the Soviet interlinear translation method — the podstróchnik — as a way of working in two directions at once: preserving old words and following the invention of new ones, for the weather, the machine, the body and love as they are now. Karelia here is a chosen place, not a refuge.
Partner and supporting institution: Karelian Language and Culture, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. Joensuu is the fixed point of the shoot; the remaining locations will be decided together with their team.
