REVIEW

FROM ANTTI ALANEN FILM DIARY; Antti Alanen (born 1955) is Film Programmer at National Audiovisual Institute

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In our age spellbound by social media people are increasingly living in virtual bubbles where they can always look at the bright side of life and present only happy and beautiful aspects of themselves.

 

On the other hand everyone has a fundamental need to be seen as she or he actually is. Which is why the phenomenon of digital depression is becoming more widespread.

 

Based on the Tarinateltta (Story Tent) television project that ran in 2008–2012, the feature-length documentary Stories from Finland is a montage of some 35 talking heads intercut with associative, conceptual, and poetic imagery and aerial photography from all over the country. There are also beautiful montages of faces.

 

The project is relevant to the reality television syndrome, but the approach is not to cash in sensation or triviality.

 

Stories from Finland is a mosaic of vignettes with ordinary and extraordinary tales. It covers all of Finland, and chronologically the stories date from the 1930s to the present day.

 

We hear happy stories of love. There is a female vignette that resembles Before Sunrise. A male narrator met Day Tripper and never recovered. We hear about the first kiss, a life-long love, a shotgun wedding, and a marriage that has lasted 42 years. 

 

Wartime memories extend to Kauhajoki during the Winter War. When there was an air raid alarm, everybody was covered in white sheets (in snow camouflage), the MPs and the patients of mental hospitals alike.

 

The ultra-militaristic education of the 1930s, rarely mentioned after 1944, is evoked here. Even a 13 year old boy was equipped with a gun.

 

We meet children from homes that were broken after WWII, and orphans. "I have never had a home". "It is difficult to display feelings". There was abuse at home. When father left the family with another woman, the children had to become beggars. Orphanages could be harsh. 

 

We meet a man who estimates that he must have been one of the last huutolainen, children for auction. Homeless children could be acquired by the family who made the cheapest bid at the auction. The children were treated worse than slaves or animals. The master of the house could hit the child at will. But one day the boy came home and found the kitchen floor covered in blood. The master had slashed his throat.

 

We hear stories about life on resettlement farms established for evacuees from Eastern Karelia after WWII. Families were huge with 12 children or more. People had nothing, but they "cared for each other more". "Kamara oli enemmän hoitava", "the fundament was more nurturing". "Joy and sorrow felt like something then".

 

School bullying was brutal. A man reminisces this in lurid detail. The chief education officer, however, learned about it. He was a war veteran. The bullies were invited into his office one by one. They returned crying out loud. The bullying stopped then and there.

 

We meet a black boy who tells about his years as a juvenile delinquent. His family sent him to Africa for one year. He visited a Quran school and witnessed a lynching at age 12: an apparently innocent man was burned alive. His eyes were opened.

 

We meet immigrants to Finland. "Loneliness is very hard to handle". A woman born in Taiwan observes that it took her 14 years to feel at home in Finland.

 

Travelling to the North, the land of the Northern Lights, we meet a gold-digger who reveals his feeling for the nature.

 

We meet a couple who has been wed according to an ancient, pre-Christian shaman wedding in Kalevala style.

 

We meet a senior lady who had a happy near death experience at the opera during a marvellous mezzo soprano's performance of Rossini's Stabat mater. "And then the damn heart started to beat again".

 

This series of vignettes resembles a collection of very short stories. They are not random, but they do not grow into a whole either, and that would be impossible.

 

The people, their faces, and their stories are eloquent. There are stories in this movie that I'm likely never to forget.

 

Among the original songs of the movie is the beautiful theme song "Kertoisin sinulle tarinan" ["I'd Like to Tell You a Story"] composed by Antti Nordin with lyrics by Sibone Oroza and sung by Franka Oroza.

 

The interviewees are not identified in the movie. The shooting locations of the Story Tent are fascinating.

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The visual concept is based on a contrast of close-ups of faces and magnificent aerial views made possible by drone cinematography.