Archive for the ‘Introductions’ Category

A New Documentary Reindeerspotting Brings Drug Addicts to the Silver Screen

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I don’t usually talk too much about the projects that I’m involved with, but I thought Reindeerspotting- Escape from Santaland is just too special not to talk about. I have been working on the film as a production manager and if you know the subject matter, you will also know that it wasn’t the easiest project to do. Now that the movie is finished I feel great, the material feels unique and the message important. I have to say that I feel honored to be apart of this movie.

Reindeerspotting is a documentary film of a group of young guys living in Rovaniemi, Arctic Circle, dabbling in petty crime and hard drugs. One of them, Jani, has lost five years of his life and two fingers to his debotators. He wants to leave Lapland and his old life behind. Robbing a supermarket is a start for his getaway. A few years back a documentarist, Joonas Neuvonen, was a young man living on social welfare and using drugs on daily basis. He started to film his friends and their life.

Reindeerspotting is the first documentary I have ever been involved with, it is also done very untraditionally. Where as usually you come up with and idea, you get a production company to finance that idea and then you make that idea come to live. In Reindeerspotting there was no idea and no plans. The director/cinematographer Joonas Neuvonen just started shooting his friends more or less randomly with no plans what so ever what to do with the material. The bags full of numerous MiniDV tapes found their way to our offices long after they were shot.

The material was so unnerving and disturbing that there was just no way we could have passed the opportunity to give people a glimpse of the dark reality of drug addicts. Reindeerspotting got the highest possible rating and is prohibited from under 18 year olds. Keep in mind that this doesn’t happen in Finland every day. And actually Reindeerspotting might even be the only documentary that has ever gotten a rating that high.

The film had it’s first screening and is competing in Tampere Film Festival on thursday and the official Finnish premiere is April 9th 2010. Check out the brand new trailer for the movie below. Unfortunately there are no english subs, but I think the images speak quite loudly anyway.

More info:
Twitter
Facebook
Official site

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Posted in Introductions, Movies, Trailers | 77 Comments »

Püha Tõnu kiusamine (The Temptation of St. Tony)

Monday, October 12th, 2009

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Püha Tõnu kiusamine (The Temptation of St. Tony) is an Estonian/Swedish/Finnish co-production directed by Veiko Õunpuu. The Estonian production company is Homeless Bob Production. The Swedish company is ATMO, that also produced Metropia (you can read my review of the movie here). And last but not least the Finnish production company is Bronson Club, where I work, and I was the production manager of the film in Finland. The Estonian premiere was on saturday and I travelled to Tallinn to see the film.

Here’s the trailer:

The Temptation of St. Tony is a film about a man who reached middle age, and finds himself in exactly the kind of darkening forest that Dante describes. An unusual problem intrudes upon his moderately prosperous and quiet life – morality. Is it possible to be a “good person”? What does that mean anyway? And what’s in it for you? On his journey towards a cleaner conscience but an increasingly complicated reality, Tony meets several typical specimens familiar from contemporary Estonian society and lives trough exciting adventures, not without diverting humor. And it starts to to seem that slowly, and quite inevitably, the man loses his job, his family, and finally reality, itself.

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Taavi Eelmaa is Tõnu

The Temptation of St. Tony is more than a movie, it is a piece of abstract art and Veiko Õunpuu is the artist. It feels almost impossible to place this movie into a certain genre, it’s more of a combination of drama, art house and even thriller. Luis Buñuel was thanked in the end credits and I imagine that he has been a big influence in the directors life and especially in the making of St. Tony.

I went to Tallinn for the premiere and here are some pictures from the premiere and after party

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For more photos, check out my Flickr.

And for more info about the movie you can visit the official site here.

I’m extremely proud of being a part of this production and I want to thank all the people involved in the making of this movie. And a special thanks to producer Katrin Kissa, whom without this movie wouldn’t exist.

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Posted in Introductions, Movies, Trailers | 81 Comments »

New And Improved Zombie Room – Zombies Get A Facelift!

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

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The Zombies are proud to present you the cool new look of the site, one we’ve been dying (literally) to get it online – and here we are now!

You are looking at a completely new site design provided by our friend Brian Chirls in his infinite wisdom and mad skillz, added with the hyper-cool Zombie Room artwork by Jussi Lehtiniemi, also known as the guy behind the Iron Sky concept art.

So, to many this might be first time you visit here – so let me tell you in brief what this site is about:

1. We complain about movies. You know, rate them, share our thoughts etc.

2. We write some news. Well, usually it’s some old shit that’s been around the internet for minutes, but we add our own flavor to it. Kinda.

3. We do lists. Different kind of lists – like what films are cool etc.

4. We do fights. Like how bad a film kicks ass compare to some other lame-ass shit film.

5. We complain about how fucked the film industry in general is. And it is. In distribution and production, and how completely lost the industry is with the Internet.

6. Also, we write about festivals. We tend to be around at film festivals quite a lot, and we like to get free badges by writing about them. A fair deal, right?

7. And we write about zombies. We kinda think they are cool.

All in all, we write about stuff we think is interesting.

And a quick word about who we are. Well, there’s two of us – Essi and Timo. Essi is the hot movie nerd chick who actually cares about films and actually knows about them. And Timo is the big guy with a loud voice and likes to mouth-breath quite a lot on films. Together, we form a team – like Mork and Mindy – called the Zombies.

We are both in film. Essi is a filmmaker, working in a company called Bronson Club here in Finland, and her coolest job so far is a Finnish horror film called Sauna, directed by AJ Annila.

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And Timo is a filmmaker who has done so far only one film, called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, but is working on the next one – called Iron Sky. He is also working on a collaborative filmmaking website called Wreckamovie, hoping to help filmmakers to get their heads out of their asses sooner than later.

So this is who we are. In addition to Zombie Room blog, you can reach us via Twitter and Facebook:

Timo on Twitter; Facebook

Essi on Twitter; Facebook

ZombieRoom on Twitter; Facebook

Thanks for checking us out, now go away and do something productive.

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Posted in Awesome, General, Introductions | 125 Comments »

And so the story begins…

Friday, February 6th, 2009

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It is now the 6th of February and we are in Berlin, Germany and as promised here is the first official blog entry from the team behind Zombie Room. Welcome aboard and hope you enjoy the ride!

Before I start, I want to introduce our contributers here at Zombie Room. We have two writers, Essi Suomela and Timo Vuorensola. I´m currently working as a production coordinator for a movie production company called Bronson Club. I´m also an aspiring producer and a film fanatic. I resently worked on a movie called Sauna, directed by AJ Annila, who also made the first Finnish kung fu movie, Jadewarrior. Timo is a director and is working for a Tampere based movie production company called Energia Productions.  Timo directed a movie called Star Wreck, that was released in 2005 for free in the internet and it has been downloaded 8 million times so far. He is currently working on his new movie Iron Sky, a science fiction comedy about nazis in the moon. We are aslo ingaged to be married in 2010.

Ok but now it is time for the first of the Berlin diarys. We will be blogging from Berlin daily, so stay tuned!

 

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Berlin Film Festival: Diary day #1

This is my first time at the Berlin Film Festival and I got to say that I´m very impressed. The town has a buzz in the air from all the movie industry folk and the spring seems to be more on the way than in Finland. Yesterday was the first day so it was quite easy and breezy for us. We had one meeting, we met up with some friends and got to know the area. I went to the market that is in a beautiful building and later on we met Todd Brown from Twitch Film and I had the most expensive drink of my life; a bubbling cosmo for 17,50 euros at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. 

I know this all sounds pretty sweet, but I think I should tell you that we are suffering from a bad case of a festival curse. Everything started with Tero Kaukomaa´s tooth. Tero is a producer and owns a company called Blind Spot Pictures. He is also the producer for Iron Sky and Sauna, and he is traveling with us here in Berlin. But anyway, he went to the dentist a day before we were leaving for Berlin and the dentist said everything was ok. But two hours later Tero bit on a piece of hard candy and broke his tooth… So he had to go to the dentist again. Then Timo broke his laptop. It just broke down basically for no reason, so we had to replace it with another one.

Then in the morning when we arrived to the airport we noticed that I had forgotten my laptop at the office. So then it had to be rushed in cab to the airport. On top of this we almost missed our flight. When we got to the hotel, all our reservations were totally messed up. When we got to the rooms, me and Tero both broke our luggage. My zipper got busted in the plain and Teros handle just broke off. Later that same night Timo got locked in at mens room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, because someone had stolen the (I guess a pretty expensive) door handle from inside the door. This was a nice addition to his migraine he had developed earlier that day.  And just a few minutes ago I was also locked out when I was having a smoke in the hotels backyard . 

Today the plan is to have meetings with potential co-producers and do promoting for Iron Sky. I will report about this more later. Let´s hope the curse is fading away…

Cheers, Essi

 

Posted in Film festivals, General, Introductions | 83 Comments »

ZOMBIES IN THE AREA! RUN!

Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Welcome to Zombie Room! In this blog, two filmmakers write about film, films and filmmaking – and try to find an answer to the question on how the Internet and film industry (or what’s left of it after the shit goes down) can co-exist . My prediction is, that the answer can be found in the next 20 years, so stay tuned.

But in the meanwhile, we just talk about stuff we think is somehow related to the topics above. Oh, and in addition to that, we blog about zombies – fictional ones, but also the real zombies roaming the offices and streets out there.

In the chart  below  (via BoingBoing) you may find a chart about Mortal terror and how it’s being affected by the Zombie population in the area. It is, until it isn’t.

To be honest, our first real stories shall come from Berlin Film Festival next week, where both of us will attend to, but before that, we’ll write short introductory emails about who we are, and why the hell should you care about us.

Enjoy the ride!

Mortal Terror / Zombie population &
Related Posts with Thumbnails

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Posted in Introductions | 46 Comments »