Leni Riefenstahl meets David Lynch in this short film by Jani Peltonen. In late 1930s Finland the Hotel Aulanko was a functionalist paradise for the modern man and woman—the place to see and be seen. Just before the outbreak of WWII, Sirkka Sari’s film career was on the rise, and she was one of the hotel’s glitterati. How she met an untimely demise on the roof of the Aulanko is a mystery that has never been completely explained. Her haunting story still draws crowds to climb the steps to the now-infamous “White Chimney,” where Sari met her fate. Peltonen combines footage from newsreels and Sari’s films and juxtaposes images of contemporary tourists with pleasure-seekers from yesteryear as they inhabit the same spaces past and present. He plays with our notions of identity, place, and memory to create, as one local man observes about the Hotel Aulanko itself, “a collection of atmospheres, viewpoints, places, and transitions.”  DRP