08/07/2025 - Part of EFP’s Future Frames at Karlovy Vary, the Finnish director’s short will enchant audiences with its mixture of existentialism, singing and seafood

Late night at a supermarket. The final customers are queueing at the fish counter. The electric lights hum. As everyone prepares for the end of the day, the former sea-dwelling inhabitants that lie in the ice to await their fate decide to sing songs as they reflect upon their lives. Fish River Anthology, an animated short by Finnish director Veera Lamminpää, is a gently funny existentialist delight that is a tender examination of the human – or should that be “piscine” – condition whilst also being a remarkable technical achievement.

Lamminpää studies Film Directing with a minor in Animation at Finland’s Aalto University and has already seen Fish River Anthology unspool at a number of festivals, including in her hometown of Tampere, where she won several awards. The film is now preparing to screen at the 59th Karlovy Vary, as part of EFP’s Future Frames.

Cineuropa: Can you tell us what inspired the idea for the film? There is a kinship with the animations of Niki Lindroth von Bahr, such as The Burden.
Veera Lamminpää: I'm honoured by that comparison – I've heard it before, and it's flattering! Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s films are incredible, so it means a lot. Fish River Anthology came from a mix of different ideas I had around the same time. I noticed that a couple of them involved a supermarket: one was about people waiting in a queue, and the other centred on fish who were wondering how they had ended up in the seafood section. What tied them together was this shared sense that no one really wanted to be there; they were all just passing through. For a while, I wasn’t sure how to connect the stories. Then I came across [the 1915 collection of poems] Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which ended up inspiring the film’s English title and helped me see how these fragments could be part of a larger whole.

Can you expand on the process of putting the film together?
When I started my Master’s studies in 2021, there was a competition to decide which graduation films would receive funding, and mine didn’t make the cut. So, from the beginning, we knew we’d have to work with almost no budget. I think some of the professors felt sorry for me, so they let us use this tiny studio in the basement of Aalto University. It used to be a chemistry lab or something, so it had great ventilation – which turned out to be perfect for building and painting miniatures.

The cellar was kind of mysterious, and people at the university started joking about it. After we wrapped principal photography, a friend told me they’d heard I’d been “keeping Arttu [our cinematographer] trapped in a dark cellar for two months”.

You’ve also mentioned how important it was for you to make a sustainable film.
Nature and animals are very close to my heart, and considering the film’s themes, it felt wrong not to take our ecological footprint into account during production. In general, I think there are a lot of good ideas out there about how to make filmmaking more sustainable, but I rarely see them put into practice. I suspect that’s because as soon as we start talking about sustainability, the conversation shifts to money. People assume it requires more planning, time or specialised (and expensive) equipment. But my experience was kind of the opposite. Because we had such a limited budget, careful planning and reusing materials actually became a way to save money. I often found myself scavenging through the school’s recycling bins, looking for leftover materials from bigger, live-action productions. That approach even made its way into the film’s world-building: the story is set in an old supermarket that’s been renovated many times over the years. So, if we ran out of a particular paint colour and had to use a slightly different shade, it just added to the idea that the store had recently been retrofitted. It all became part of the texture of the world and made the set feel alive.

What projects are you planning next?
I recently received a screenwriting grant from the Finnish Film Foundation for my next short film, which I’m really excited about. It’s a stop-motion animation featuring taxidermied birds who live inside a primary school. On the feature side, I have a couple of projects in early development. One is a hybrid feature that blends live-action footage with stop-motion and puppetry. I’m also developing a TV series concept that I’d describe as leaning into the “Finnish weird” – something a bit offbeat, surreal and deadpan.