Finnish Film Affair Makes Pitch for Helsinki as ‘Capital of Weird’

They came with their visions for the offbeat and the absurd, with the genre-bending and narrative-defying, some bearing props as they pitched their projects under trippy psychedelic lighting in Helsinki’s historic Bio Rex theater. If you wanted to gauge the mood at the first edition of the Finnish Film Affair’s Finnish Weird pitching session, it was summed up by the creator who greeted the audience at the start of his two-minute pitch with a rousing, “Hello to all the weirdos in the room!”

A new addition to the annual industry event, which runs parallel to the Helsinki Intl. Film Festival, Finnish Weird — or F-Weird, as it’s already affectionately known — was unveiled this year to showcase unusual, daring and unexplored ideas across a range of formats while defying traditional standards and embracing uniqueness.

According to Finnish Film Affair head Alisha Hasan, the event was launched in an effort to shake up and expand upon the traditional pitching sessions in Helsinki.

“Finnish Weird came about from us looking at the feedback from the previous years. So many people had asked for more pitches, and we thought, ‘Okay, let’s have more projects, more pitches,’” Hasan told Variety. “At the same time, we knew that there aren’t that many avenues for up-and-coming filmmakers. So then it was clear that we need a new project call that needs to include up-and-coming filmmakers.

“Also, talking to people in the industry, I know that everyone in our industry, no matter what job they’re doing, they all have projects in their desk drawer — some creative project that might be their secret dream, the dream that they don’t even dare show anyone,” she continued. “It might be so weird that the budget is just unheard of in their country, or there might be some other obstacle. We wanted to be very inclusive. We wanted to just say welcome to the people who are maybe on the sidelines of the industry, some people…