FILMS BY SIRKKA-LIISA KONTTINEN
THE WRITING IN THE SAND (Amber Films, 1991)
ODE TO ‘THE WRITING IN THE SAND’, (2020) A Film about Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
For well over a decade beginning in the late 1970s, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen documented the seashore as a year-round destination of leisure for English families. Composed of black and white photographs, this exuberant project was developed as an exhibition, award winning film and book (Dewi Lewis, 2000).
The film, composed of 400 of Konttinen’s photographs, has been screened at the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, in addition to venues in Canada, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, and New Zealand. It won The Environment Award of Northern Electric Arts Awards, UK (1991), Le Prix du Documentaire Européan, Cinéma du Réel, Paris, France (1992) and Grand Prix, The City of Melbourne Award for Best Film, Australia (1992).
Made on the occasion of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs’ 2020 summer exhibition, Writing in the Sand, this short captures Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in her morning rituals at the shore near her home in north east England.
Unfolding like a love poem, it was produced by her filmmaker husband Peter Roberts, with whom she made, among many other creative projects, The Writing in the Sand film almost thirty years prior.
LETTERS TO KATJA (1989) A Film by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
BYKER (1983) A Film by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Byker is an intimate portrait of a community faced with redevelopment.
When Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to the North East of England in 1969 as a founder member of Amber, she set up home in Byker, a working class part of Newcastle upon Tyne. As she began to document the terraced community, she became aware of the plans for its demolition, to make way for the building of the Byker Wall, designed by architect Ralph Erskine.
This lent urgency to her work, which continued over until the early 1980s and the completion of the new estate.
In 1981 Amber began work on the film. Drawing on Sirkka’s images and interviews, on documentary footage and dramatisation, it evokes an entire era in British working class life.
A chronicle of Finnish-born photographer and Amber founding member Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's return to her roots in Finland with her daughter Katja, after 23 years in Britain.
It is a deeply personal and evocatively universal documentary: 'Perhaps the freedom I wanted most, was the freedom not to know which journeys I might embark on in my life, and where they might take me. And like so many others, perhaps I had to leave in order to find just what I had left behind.' Constructed out of film shot during the year she spent in Finland, family video and photographs, it is linked to her exhibition My Finnish Routes and a series of Amber photo films - Byker, Keeping Time, The Writing in the Sand, Today I'm With You and Song for Billy.
What is an Art Collective? (2022) A film by Tate
