Directing

Marjut Rimminen

Marjut Rimminen is a Finnish-born animator and film director who has lived and worked in London since 1974. Her short films take their subjects from life, and often difficult ones: the lives of women and girls, how childhood shapes adulthood, the silences of family life, and the aftermath of war in ordinary homes. She handles them with lightness, play and dark humour. She works in drawn cel, puppets, clay, collage, pixilation, live action, 3D and digital compositing, and often combines several in one frame. The Stain (1991), made with Christine Roche, is a dark domestic fable of incest and family secrets; it won special jury prizes at Hiroshima and San Francisco in 1992. Many Happy Returns (1996), which draws on her own childhood squint, won the Grand Prix at the Tampere International Short Film Festival and first prize at Fantoche in 1997, and was nominated for the Cartoon d'Or. I'm Not a Feminist, but... (1986), from the cartoons of Christine Roche, won the Special Jury Prize at Cinanima. Some Protection (1987), made for Channel 4's Blind Justice series, sets the prison testimony of Josie O'Dwyer in her own voice, and is discussed in the histories of animated documentary. Learned by Heart (Sydämeen kätketty, 2007), directed with Päivi Takala, looks at Finnish families after the Second World War through archive film and animation, and won Best Animation at Tampere in 2007. Her earlier film The Bridge (Silta, 1982), financed by YLE, Swedish Radio and the Finnish Film Foundation, is a satire of war and peace. For Finnish children she co-directed the stop-motion series Urpo & Turpo (1996) with Liisa Helminen, from Hannele Huovi's books. Retrospectives of her films have been held at Tampere and the Stuttgart Trickfilm Festival (both 1998), Animerte Dager in Norway (1999) and Tricky Women in Vienna (2008), and she has sat on many international festival juries. She teaches animation direction at the National Film and Television School and at Aalto University in Helsinki, and has taught at the Royal College of Art. She studied graphic design at the Helsinki College of Applied Arts (Taideteollinen oppilaitos), graduating in 1968, and began directing and animating television commercials in Helsinki. One of the first, Vivante (1971), was named Best Animated Commercial at Animafest Zagreb in 1972. She then joined Halas and Batchelor Animation in London. Her commercials number more than eighty productions for Finnish and British advertisers, and in 2000 the trade paper Markkinointi & Mainonta called her the most internationally recognised Finnish animator working in advertising. Her husband, the animation producer Dick Arnall (1944-2007), produced I'm Not a Feminist, but... and worked on The Stain. Their son Timo Arnall did the digital compositing and visual effects on her later work.