Rob Munday

A favourite of the festival scene, Elli Vuorinen’s Sore Eyes for Infinity combines a warped style with an equally warped narrative about an optician and her encounters with her unusual customers. A truly trippy tale where the characters represent concerns about topical issues, Vuorinen’s modern fairytale is a reaction to the current situation in her homeland Finland and around the world.

“In the film, the optician’s peculiar customers represent my concerns about climate change, the medical industry, entertainment, and the general lack of empathy”, the director explains. “Our actions have consequences and we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to them, no matter how sore it might make our eyes.”

Combining digital frame-by-frame animation and digital cut-out animation, Sore Eyes for Infinity cleverly plays with focus and perspective to create an aesthetic utterly fitting for this off-kilter story of an optician’s bizarre day. Immersing its viewers with in its distorted world, despite Vuorinen’s film feeling quite abstract it is obviously a hugely personal story that comes from the heart and she delivers it with such style and panache, it’s hard not fall in love with it.

“My films are often somewhat surreal and a bit twisted”

“The atmosphere in the film is just a little bit off to make it OK for a monkey to come and buy 3D glasses and for the femme fatale woman to suck people to her to wear them like a evening dress” says Vuorinen. “My films are often somewhat surreal and a bit twisted. In this film, I tried to combine the surreal and serious with a cartoon world and to create a story that will surprise the viewer.”

Elli has recently finished her latest short Still Lives, which she describes as “an experimental stop motion animation starring traditional figurines from folk art”, so keep an eye out for that in festivals throughout 2019.