FinnFest 2023

The 40th annual FinnFest USA is an event with academic and cultural components that inform as well celebrate Finnish and Finnish American culture. The five-day festival at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center runs July 26-30, with some events at other locations. For a full rundown of the schedule for each day, visit finnfest.us.

Workshops, seminars, tours, concerts and arts, and camaraderie define a FinnFest. Speakers and special guests include Finnish Ambassador to the United States Mikko Hautala, who will participate in a Friday afternoon keynote event focused on Finland and NATO.

Each evening features music and movies. Samuli Edelmann, both a movie star and a pop singer in Finland, will headline a Saturday evening pop concert in the DECC’s Symphony Hall. Edelmann, who stars in the TV series The Reindeer Mafia will also be present for a Q&A following a showing of the first two episodes in the series. During the festival, the Zeitgeist theater will showcase a variety of Finnish films. One film, Ricky Rapper and the Wild Machine, part of a popular Finnish children’s film series, will be shown in the afternoons.

Other downtown sites will feature visual arts. A pop-up art exhibit with works by Finnish American artists will be held at the Nordic Center, and Sara Pajunen, audio-visual artist, will present her work in a one-woman show at Joseph Nease Gallery.

At the DECC, artists working within Nordic aesthetics will both show and sell ceramics, textiles and wood working in the tori.

While the schedule varies each day, the tori (the Finnish word for “marketplace”) will provide a constant “go-to” center for the festival. DECC’s 50,000 sq. ft. Pioneer Hall will be transformed into a center where Finland and Finnish America meet the public. Vendors will be selling Finnish-related products, both handmade crafts and commercial imports. Companies and organizations with Nordic connections will be available to answer questions and inform. Free to all, the tori will open at noon on Thursday afternoon and continue daily through noon on Sunday, July 30.

DECC’s Symphony Hall will be a second center, opening with a 5 p.m. Thursday variety show that includes special guests as well as the first live appearance of the international choir that Seattle musician Maria Männistö developed and conducted virtually during the pandemic. On Friday evening, an orchestra composed of northern Minnesota and national professional musicians interested in performing an all-Finnish contemporary concert will take over the space under the direction of Craig Johnson, conductor of the Twin Cities’ Minnehaha Repertoire Orchestra. Smaller folk, pop, and jazz groups will share stages at Pizza Luce, Zeitgeist and Fitger’s.

Two public dances, featuring traditional waltzes, polkas, two-steps and tangos are scheduled for the Holiday Inn. Teresa Aho’s band from Finland, Minn. will play for dancing on Thursday night; Richard Koski and friends from Western New York State will perform the first set on Saturday night with Oren Tikkanen and friends from the Keweenaw Peninsula will play the second.

FinnFest Friday and Saturday daytime programming will use DECC’s many meeting rooms for panels, keynotes and workshops on a wide range of topics: historical topics like the first prime minister of Finland, a man who became a Finnish American immigrant as well as contemporary topics like the Lutheran Church in Crisis, and Nordic efforts in behalf of Environmental Sustainability.

Attendees will also connect with writers working with Finnish American themes, who will read from and discuss their work.

Because FinnFest recognizes that the Duluth region developed on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous peoples, primarily the Anishinaabeg, Ojibwe, and Chippewa peoples, FinnFest will focus part of this Friday/Saturday programming on the Sámi indigenous people of Finland, and “Finnishinaabe” people, a group identifying with both Finnish and American Indigenous ancestry. Three underserved populations, Sámi, Sámi American and Finnishinaabe, will become visible and known.

FinnFest USA is a non-profit corporation founded in 1983 in Minneapolis. The corporation’s mission is both educational and commemorative: to connect Americans to contemporary Finland and Finnish America and to deepen Americans’ understanding of how these two small cultures contribute to American and global culture.

Register online at eventbrite.com.