The Festival opening ceremony: Janus Rasmussen live (Kiasmos) plays the score for the film “A Trip to Mars”!

Janus Rasmussen, a Faroese vocalist, composer and producer, co-founder of the Kiasmos duet, will take us on a cosmic musical voyage to Mars where love, beauty, good and peace reign! Everyone knows that Martians are a symbol of all that which the Earth, since its beginnings, lacks. This Danish sci-fi movie from the beginning of the 20^th century objects to the cruelty and senselessness of war.

Janus Rasmussen is a vocalist, composer and producer from the Faroe Islands who permanently lives in Reykjavik. He started his career in the electro-pop band Bloodgroup but gained wider recognition through joining forces with the composer Olafur Arnalds. For a decade now he has been a part of the popular band Kiasmos but has recently decided to publish a solo record, one that is completely his own. Entitled “Vin”, it came out in March of this year under the label of Ki Records belonging to Christian Loeffler and is the result of the author’s unrestrained artistic experiments. These pieces, presented earlier in the sets of numerous DJs, are difficult to classify. “I didn’t want everything on this record to be perfect. I intended for some of these pieces to sound raw” – explained the Faroese musician. It is enough to say that his aim has been achieved: the disk resonates with non-obvious, shimmering with different colors and breaking all schematics electronic music. “Thanks to sound your head can go in any direction it wants to” said Rasmussen after his work had finally seen the light of day.

A Trip to Mars / Himmelskibet (dir.Holger-Madsen, Denmark 1918, 81’)

The film, referring in a way to “The Trip to the Moon” by Méliès, tells a story about the Exelsior voyage of several daredevils to Mars. In this picture by Holger-Madsen the planet is not inhabited by hostile aliens but by friendly human beings. Mars resembles a perfect, paradisiacal land made to look like ancient Greece. Love, beauty, good and peace reign here. Mars is a symbol of all that which the Earth lacks. To remedy that, the brave astronauts return to Earth in the company of a beautiful Martian woman who is to initiate a new life, full of harmony and peace.

The movie, shot during World War I, became a manifesto protesting against the cruelty and senselessness of war causing such destruction in Europe of that time… It turns out that its message is still extraordinarily valid today!