In-Between
2020 · 3m · Finland
Directed by Anna Nykyri
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A montage of photography and moving image across Helsinki, Mexico City, and New York capturing pandemic-era cityscapes and the transient bodies that avoid contact.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Three cities, one pandemic, zero narrative — it's almost aggressively uncommitted to meaning, which would be pretentious if the film didn't seem genuinely uncertain about what connection even looks like anymore; that ambivalence is the only honest thing about it.
Nykyri locates this work squarely in the lineage of Agnès Varda and Chris Marker—the essay film as a thinking-through rather than a conclusion—and the restraint of holding three geographies in parallel without false equivalence is formally rigorous in a way that rewards attention.
The decision to photograph avoidance itself—empty streets, figures at distance, the negative space of contact—transforms what could be a predictable pandemic document into something about the grammar of bodies in space; it's a single compositional choice that reframes the entire project.