MP – minä pelkään

Pekka Hyytiäinen: MP – minä pelkään (FI 1982).

MP – jag är rädd / [MP – I Live in Fear].
    FI 1982. PC: Lähikuva Oy. D+SC: Pekka Hyytiäinen. DP: Petteri Kotilainen – shot on 16 mm – colour and b&w – released on 35 mm – the director's last will: the 16 mm print is definitive.
    C: Liisa Halonen (mother), Pekka Valkeejärvi (father), Heta Hyytiäinen (Mari, their young daughter), Matti Kanerva (soldier).
    83 min.
    A 16 mm print viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 10 Dec 2008

Pekka Hyytiäinen in memoriam (he died in January 2008). He directed three totally original feature films, of which this is the last.

This film got only 302 spectators during its term of release, so we, though not many, were a significant part of the total audience of the film which has never been telecast or released on home formats.

The print has a soft quality and the colour looks faded, but this seems to have been the case already at the release.

It begins and ends without an image, with a male voice.

It's a poet's vision of the fear of war. A family retreats at their country house, incessant sounds of military exercises are heard day and night.

Nightmares and visions of warfare are intercut with the story of the family's stay.

There is a lone soldier in the wood nearby, and he makes an attempt to rape the mother, interrupted, as he cannot sustain erection.

A cinematic stream of consciousness.

There is some affinity with Ingmar Bergman's Skammen.

The film would deserve to be much wider known, with friends of experimental film, to begin with. It is marred by its substandard technical and visual quality (in a Jack Smith kind of way).