Continents

One of the earliest documented mentions of maize connected to Finland dates back to 1750, in the writings of naturalist and explorer Pehr Kalm, professor at the Royal Academy of Turku. After returning from North America in 1751, Kalm brought with him seeds of useful plants and later experimented with cultivating maize in Turku. In his writings, he describes being astonished by the sight of miles and miles of maize fields across North America.

Pablo Neruda, in his poem Ode to Maize, tells us that a grain of maize was the geography of the Americas. In his image, America rises from that grain until its spacious lands fill the foaming ocean. The journey of maize across territories offers a starting point for thinking about the Americas themselves: a continent shaped by overlapping ethnic, linguistic, historical, political, natural, and geographical realities. As maize travelled beyond the Americas and acquired new cultural meanings, it also became a way of thinking about how species, people, and ideas move, and how the identity of a territory is continually constructed through those movements.

Cinema participates in this same circulation. Films move across borders carrying languages, memories, histories, and ways of seeing from one territory into another. In that movement, they encounter new audiences, enter new contexts, and generate new meanings.

It was precisely this parallel between maize and cinema, both carriers of tradition and connection, that led me to shape the film selection of the 21st edition of the Helsinki Latin American Film Festival: Cinemaissí.

This year’s curatorial theme, Continents, explores cinema across territories, languages, ethnicities, and landscapes. Moving through the Americas and beyond, the programme frames maize as a shifting constellation of memory, migration, ecology, linguistic convergence, artistic influence, and cultural exchange. The programme invites audiences in Finland to experience cinema as a space where the notion of a territory is continually challenged, connected, and redefined.

These films move between places and imaginaries, revealing connections that geopolitical borders often obscure. Through arthouse fiction, contemplative documentaries, experimental cinema, and essay films, the selection traces unexpected relationships between Indigenous worlds, capitalism, colonial histories, poetic thinking, linguistic territories, ecological transformations, genocide, and the circulation of creative knowledge.

The programme sets films into dialogue across a diverse range of languages: Nengee Tongo, Aymara, Guianan and Canadian French, Mennonite Low German, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish, Farsi, English, Japanese, and Icelandic. At the same time, we have prioritised showcasing films from a wide range of regions and territories such as Guatemala, Suriname, Palestine, Uruguay, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, Brazil, Québec, Mexico, and more.

The selection also moves across different decades and generations of cinema, bringing into dialogue established and influential filmmakers such as Pablo Perelman, Patricio Guzmán, Carlos Reygadas, Aki Kaurismäki, and Óscar Catacora, alongside vibrant contemporary voices such as Ana Vaz, Darlene Naponse, Alê Abreu, Irene Gómez Emilsson, and Sebastián Mayayo, among others. In this constellation, cinematic history is presented as another territory in movement.

Furthermore, this year we decided to inaugurate the first award in the history of the festival: The Pohjoismaissi Award, a curatorial distinction granted to a film of exceptional execution that reflects the values and cinematic vision of the festival.

In the same way, we are proud to present 20 feature films, with domestic and transatlantic screenings across Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Karkkila, Oulu, Utsjoki, and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Ode to Maize reveals something interesting. To Neruda, it is maize itself that seems to expand the territories, and this metaphor strongly resonates with the origins of Cinemaissí. Where Kalm followed maize across the ocean as a seed in motion, Neruda imagined within that same grain the vastness of a continent. Today, our festival’s programme takes shape at the intersection of those movements: miles and miles of cinematic fields, miles and miles of living vessels.

Showcasing Latin American cinema in Finland, and Finnish cinema in Latin America, the programme will bring North American, European, Nordic, and Finnish premieres to local audiences. For more than two decades, the festival has been built through the efforts of the Latin American diaspora in Helsinki, a diaspora that has found its Finnishness through constant dialogue, exchange, and participation in contemporary cinema discourse.

This edition of Cinemaissí is dedicated to the life and work of Patricio Guzmán (1941–2026), whose ethical vision and poetic sensibility are deeply needed in today’s geopolitical context. A context shaped by the supremacy of misinformation, censorship and the brutal annihilation of the world’s underrepresented peoples.

So take a moment, pop some corn, and embrace the continents these films carry within them.

 

Daniel Malpikka
Artistic Director