Katariina Lillqvist

Born in 1963 in Tampere, Finland. She studied film directory and has participated in exhibitions such as the Anifest-International Festival of Animated Films (Teplice, Czech Republic, 2011) and In Praise of Shadows, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, 2008, Istanbul Modern, Turkey, 2009 and the Benaki Museum, Athens, 2009). She is a Finnish film director, writer and animation artist who has been working over twenty years in Prague. Her mysterious puppet animations have won countless prizes, including the Silver Bear from Berlin Film festival of 1996.

This autumn I am celebrating my 20th year as an independent film maker and animation artist. If I had to choose one main theme which is present in all of my works, it is definitely clear it is definitely clear what I’d choose: the seeking of freedom. I grew up in Lutheran Finland, where I found our protestant values and extreme Americanization unsuitable for young artists. But something more complicated was in my way; in the bygone Czechoslovakia of the late eighties, I crashed with the gray reality of dying socialism. As a young film student, I cheered eagerly for Vaclav Havel and the People’s Forum of the Velvet Revolution, but after a few ecstatic and hectic years the idealists gave up and left the playground free for monstrous, greedy capitalism. So, where is freedom? Does it really exist anywhere?

 

My new film also deals with the issue of freedom, although wrapped in the form of fairytale. I started to plan this project eight years ago while visiting Teheran. There, I held a scriptwriting workshop for young animation students and, as I had a full female class, we often had inspiring debates concerning the education and the position of girls in society. The result of these debates is Faruza, a film dedicated to the victims of the student riots in Teheran.

 

Katariina Lillqvist