Highlights of the Second Festival Day: Valvesali’s Kino Concert, the Finnish Premiere of Baby Invasion and the Nordic Music Video Competition

The Friday of the Oulu Music Video Festival kicks off with the Finnish competition screenings, running all day at Studio. The videos have been divided according to the festival’s hyperreality theme, modelled after reality TV formats ranging from Survivor to Big Brother.

The undisputed highlight of the day will be experienced at 21:00 in Valvesali: a programme number consisting of a silent film concert and an audiovisual live performance. The evening opens with experimental short film classics from the 1920s, accompanied by the minimalist electronic music of Norwegian act The Glorian. The noise-tinged soundscape continues with Billy Roisz’s Lunar Dust, which premiered in January at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. At OMVF, a special version will be performed as Roisz is joined on stage by Ilpo Väisänen, the Finnish electronic music eminence known from the legendary Pan Sonic. The performances last approximately 80 minutes, including an interval.

As on the previous day, Friday also ventures into the world of gaming. The special screening God Mode offers an eclectic selection of machinima landmarks and 8-bit classics, featuring everything from Travis Scott to The Killers. Meanwhile, the Finnish premiere of Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion (2024) will be screened. Propelled by the beats of electronic music icon Burial, the film is presented as a “live broadcast” of an ultrarealistic first-person shooter leaked onto the dark web, in which a squad of mercenaries disguised as baby avatars invades the mansions of the super-rich with murder on their minds.

The brand-new Nordic Competition showcases videos from, among others, Fever Ray and Orvokki, with ten directors from Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden present to take questions from the audience. Next Wave, presenting up-and-coming Finnish directors, features fresh domestic music videos created through Finland’s first OMVF Next programme for music video directors. Five directors were selected for the masterclass, where over the past six months they have developed new works under the mentorship of filmmaker Mika Taanila and director Marcus Söderlund. These videos will now be shown for the very first time on the big screen, with both the creators and mentors present.

When Valve closes its doors, the festival crowd will head to Snooker Time. The late-night club features pioneer of retro computer art Tero, with visuals by VJ LNA. The audience will also have the chance to request their favourites from OMVF’s music video jukebox, which contains 7,301 videos from 1994–2024.

The festival’s audiovisual art exhibition can be visited during the opening hours of Cultural Centre Valve at Valvegalleria, and in Valve’s Paljetti Silakka Lounge local DJs will play music between 12:00 and 20:00.

Festival schedules can be found here:
https://www.omvf.net/schedule