Reflective Encounters

“Flying Potatoes and Other Misunderstandings has the feel of a shaggy dog story. At first, we follow a filmmaker in a Parisienne café, detailing her plans for a ‘Western’ about two immigrants settling in Finland. Then, the story smoothly transforms into a rather more personal account of the two men's (Hami Bahadori and Yassine Khaled) lives. In turn, they each describe their own story, taking in a farming allotment in Helsinki and a racist attack. Frustrated, one of the two throws a potato into the air, which seems to take on a life of its own in a Python-esque aside.

Director Elina Oikari seems to flit between different formats of film throughout. The varying density of film grain across the short is suggestive of the morphic qualities of analogue itself, moulding itself to the contours of light, photochemical reactions, and to the owner of the film itself. Therein lies the central message behind the film’s absurdist, playful tone: for all the japes and shenanigans, Flying Potatoes is about narrative agency and authorial control. Who gets to tell our story, and why should they tell it in the first place?”

— Fedor Tot