Velinen sunnuntai

“The fourteenth Velinen Sunday. In the previous years, I’ve tried to make my screening perfect, but something has always been left nagging at me after the screening. Sometimes we’ve fallen short of a perfect performance because I’ve been out of sorts myself, mourning the end of the festival and letting emotions affect me too much. Other times I haven’t prepared enough—I’ve just read my dull jokes off my phone and kept glancing at the clock. Sometimes even I’ve thought that the music videos I chose weren’t quite the best of the best. It’s never the fault of the audience—the audience at every one of my video screenings has been the best in Oulu.

Maybe the magic of Velinen Sunday and the secret to its longevity lies precisely in the fact that although the screening always aims to be the “perfect” conclusion to the festival, its curator and storyteller is only human. A human who makes mistakes, arrives on too little sleep, missing one shoe, voice gone—or then full of energy and in a good mood. So come to Velinen Sunday just as you are, eat chips and candy, watch great or not-so-great music videos, and above all, witness a simple human being still far from perfect.”

- Veli Kauppinen