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Matti Harju

Matti Harju

Directing

Biography

Matti HARJU studied MA in Directing Fiction at the NFTS (UK) and received an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. His film school shorts and self-produced films have been presented at international festivals including Locarno, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Clermont-Ferrand, BFI London, AFI Fest Los Angeles, Doclisboa, Edinburgh, 25FPS and Torino. Nox, his second feature film, produced by Elokuvayhtiö Testifilmi Oy, had its world premiere in the Harbour section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Harju primarily works with 16 mm and Super 8 film, alongside digital and analog video. His films examine contemporary forms of belief, image culture and ideological construction through a deliberately unstable cinematic language.

Known For

Nox
N/A

From the wreckage of a buddy comedy rises something stranger: a story that fractures midway into an existential revenge thriller—burning forward with the inevitability of the sun’s passage across the sky.

Nox

2026
One in Four
10.0

Haunted by his involvement in a suicide, train driver Sion struggles to comprehend the consequences somebody else's decision could have on his own life.

One in Four

2008
Natura
N/A

An unsettling mystery about desperation and class divisions in the age of digital capitalism.

Natura

2023
No image
N/A

Set in the darkest time of the year, a feverish and delirious film about a small and ever-shrinking island within – located somewhere between the search for pleasure and the inherently destructive powers of capitalism – the Ecstasy.

Ecstasy

2023
Minus World
N/A

Nintendo game, codeine and online bdsm all blend in this minimalistic speculation circling and edging towards a new view of otherness within.

Minus World

2021
New Age
N/A

In the cold northern light, the hours and the days of two friends, the mechanisms of daily life and the expectations of a decadent reality which reveals itself in the dawns and sunsets, in the nights spent drinking and the groggy mornings-after. The Finnish artist Matti Harju offers himself in this self-portrait of (his) life, perhaps involuntarily placid and sweet.

New Age

2018
Time Will Not Tell
N/A

Artist-filmmaker Htoo Lwin Myo examines some of the earliest pre-cinematic objects portraying Myanmar's colonial past: magic lantern slides. A polyphonous essay on the perils of history and the many stories we can find in the remains of times gone.

Time Will Not Tell

2026
Man Seeking Man
5.5

Fifty-year-old Seppo puts a contact ad in the newspaper. After many years, his son decides to look him up, just on the day that Seppo has a date. Sober and painful yet moving drama about loneliness and family bonds. - IFFR Duration: 12m Colour, Stereo Original format: Super 16mm film

Man Seeking Man

2004
El centro
N/A

Young Anon discovers the digital root of everything during a school trip to New York and comes to a surprising conclusion.

El centro

2021
Born to Feel
N/A

Rumination about free will and the nature of feelings in the midst of tumblr aesthetics from the early 2010s. All video and audio material is either from unfinished projects or surplus material from completed ones. The text is partly autobiographical, partly fiction.

Born to Feel

2022
Afrikka
10.0

Young Finnish filmmaker Harju's disturbing, raw film gets up close to a psychotic man. We don't all live in the same reality. Nerve-wracking and frayed experimental fiction that shows a psychotic man and his direct surroundings in a totally uncompromising way. 'Our interaction with others is based on the idea that we all share the same reality. That turns out not always to be the case.'

Afrikka

2011
Three Days of Rain
N/A

Part time Twitch streamer, part time drug courier; both low level. Slithering between life and death, online and offline. The carefree summer of global progress seems to be over - are these the final days of both, the illusion of overarching narrative, and of Jerome the Saint.

Three Days of Rain

2022
Aliens
N/A

A film about how language, be it film, art or written language, creates in itself a system where separation precedes contact.

Aliens

2021