Time of Roses (Blu-ray)

Finnish director Risto Jarva’s fascinating, futuristic sci-fi mystery is set in a dystopian, Pop Art-designed world of gleaming white towers, Sony video monitors and inflatable furniture, where the beautiful inhabitants all dress as Edie Sedgwick-like pixie sprites or medieval page boys out of LOGAN’S RUN. A historian of late 20th century culture - “before class boundaries were abolished” – named Raimo (Arto Tuominen) is researching the death many years earlier of a free-spirited erotic model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) who died under mysterious circumstances. (She caused a public scandal by asking three of her wealthy, powerful lovers to pay for an abortion). Raimo finds Saara’s identical double – an earthy, uninhibited engineer named Kisse (also played by Vepsä) -- and tries to convince her to re-enact Saara’s life and death for TV. Director Jarva was one of Finland’s most acclaimed fiction filmmakers and documentarians before he was tragically killed in an auto accident returning from a screening in 1977. His fabulously quirky vision of Future World, with its fragmented & abstract political conversation and semi-orgies (all waving hands and sitar music!) would have delighted both Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. • RISTO JARVA, TYÖTOVERINI (RISTO JARVA, MY COLLEAGUE), 1984, 59 min., dir. Antti Peippo – a rarely-seen Finnish TV documentary featuring archival interview footage of Jarva and clips from his films.
• Two of Jarva’s brilliant, unconventional short films from the 1960s: his wildly satirical deconstruction of TV advertising, “Pakasteet” (Frozen Foods), 1969, 15 min. , and his Mod / Pop Art-influenced documentary “Computers Serve” (Tietokoneet palvelevat), 1968, 14 min.. (Both in Finnish with English subtitles.)
• Deleted scene and original song "The Swallow Tower" (Pääskytorni) performed by Otto Donner cut from TIME OF ROSES.
• Original trailer
• New commentary by film critic, professor and programmer Olaf Möller.
• New essay by filmmaker and critic Ville Suhonen of the Risto Jarva Association.
• Newly translated extracts from Risto Jarva’s writings.
• authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity In Motion.