Täynnä Tarmoa

[Full av Iver] / [Full of Vigour]. FI (c) 2008 Tuotantoyhtiö Kuvaputki Oy. P+D+SC: Oskari Pastila. DP: Jarmo Tahvanainen, Janke Öhman. Colour definition: Juha Laine (Generator Post). Graphic design: Eevaliina Rusanen, Miikka Poutiainen. M: Shinge Joonas Shigeki Tamura. S: Kimmo Vänttinen. ED: Jukka Nykänen. A documentary film. LOC: Porvoo. Featuring: The Porvoon Tarmo basketball team and its foreign guest players, coaches, guardians, and fans. 72 min. Print: Bio Rex Distribution, English dialogue sections with Finnish subtitles, viewed at Cinema Orion, 7 Jan 2010.

The title is a wordplay. "Tarmo" is the name of the team, and the word means "vigour". "Täynnä Tarmoa" means both "full of vigour" and "fed up with Tarmo".

Elias Anhela, our doorman, commented that this film is the Spinal Tap of basketball. But, incredibly, this is an actual documentary film. It is an amazing account of gross incompetence in basketball management. Bafflingly, the people featuring in this film have apparently given their consent to film the most embarrassing moments... the new manager is a walking definition of dishonesty... he lacks elementary budgetary skills... the manager and the new coach are not on speaking terms... they read about each other's essential decisions from the newspaper... but they slander each other... black athletes from Africa and America are grossly exploited... nobody is responsible for their budget... their lodgings are uninhabitable, or the rental agreement has been terminated... the squirming sponsors want to cut their participation... beautiful female basketball fans waste little time in checking out new athletes... fiscal fraud is chronical... cooked account books are exposed...

One of the documentary films that prove that truth is stranger than fiction.

In 2006-2007 the quota restricting foreign players in Finnish basketball was abolished. Porvoon Tarmo doubled its budget and hired a new manager and a new coach.

The new manager also commissioned Oskari Pastila's team to produce a reality tv series about the team. The series never happened, and maybe this film is the vengeance of Pastila's team.

The film is not a real sports documentary, and it neglects to tell that Porvoon Tarmo, which had so far been a minor team, actually succeeded well despite all this.