Jan Ijäs

Two Forests

The documentary takes the viewer on a serene afternoon stroll through the Japanese mental landscape and culture, with death and ageing as its perspectives.

House of the Wickedest Man in the World

House of the Wickedest Man in the World is the story of a ruined building near the city of Cefalú in Sicily. In the early 1920s, Aleister Crowley, the most famous occultist of his time, lived in the building, practicing magical rituals. In the summer of 1955, Kenneth Anger, considered one of the pioneers of experimental cinema, traveled with sexologist Alfred Kinsey to Sicily to find Aleister Crowley’s temple to shoot a film about the occultist’s time in Cefalú. The Thelema Abbey film was never released.

Waste no.6 How Great

What if waste suddenly became huge? When we discover that underneath an orthodox church (in Helsinki) there is a world data server, which uses recycled water to cool itself, we confirm that nothing is what it seems. From here we start a trip around the world, passing through South Korea, Ghana and Turkey. The constant exclamation “How Great” becomes part of our lexicon, to amaze us, always. The world seen through the evocation of waste can only make the world alert. Come back Greta!

Absolute Street

Samuel Beckett made a single work for projected cinema. The film ‘Film’ was shot in New York in the summer of 1964. Beckett needed one street scene for the opening of the film, and he wanted that street image to be shot in a street that he described as ”absolute street”.

Waste vol. 1

A documentary consisting of six chapters.

On the Art of Set Design

Before sliding into the uniform of his father, the dictator and founder of the “Republic” of North Korea, Kim Jong II was passionate about film. He was said to have a collection of 20,000 videos, with a predilection for action films… from the West of course. One-time director of Arts and Humanities at the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, he wrote in the 1970s an essay on the theoretical practice of how the 7th art should express the ideology in place. Jan Iljäs drew inspiration from the clear principles of the “Shining Star” to create a short film composed of shots taken during a touristic trip to the country.

Waste no.5 The Raft of the Medusa

Le radeau de la Méduse parallels the wrecked boats of the African immigrants on the Italian Lampedusa island and the abandoned cars of asylum seekers that have traveled from Russia to Salla, Finnish Lapland with Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), located in Louvre. Based on true events, the subject of the painting is the 1816 shipwreck of Méduse, a frigate with administrative personnel on their way from France to African colonies. The passengers of the ship rescued on a raft they built and left drifting on the open sea with fatal consequences.