The Scarlet Drop (2024 digital transfer Cineteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago/Cinemateca del Pacífico)

Jack Ford: The Scarlet Drop (US 1918). Molly Malone (Molly Calvert), Harry Carey ("Kaintuck"). From: The National. 

Jack Ford: The Scarlet Drop (US 1918). From: IMDb.

Jack Ford: The Scarlet Drop (US 1918). Molly Malone (Molly Calvert), Harry Carey ("Kaintuck"). From: IMDb.

Jack Ford: The Scarlet Drop (US 1918). Molly Malone (Molly Calvert), Harry Carey ("Kaintuck"). Photo: Cineteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago / Cinemateca del Pacifico.               

Jack Ford: The Scarlet Drop (US 1918). Mother and son. Anna Townsend  as Mother Ridge, Harry Carey as "Kaintuck" Harry Ridge. The disdain of the Calverts towards the Ridges in front of the church.

La gota escarlata / La goccia rossa. (US 1918) dir: Jack Ford. scen: George Healey, Jack Ford. photog: Ben F. Reynolds. cast: Harry Carey (“Kaintuck” Harry Ridge), Molly Malone (Molly Calvert), Betty Schade (Betty Calvert), Vester Pegg (Marley Calvert), Millard K. Wilson (Graham Lyons), Martha Mattox (Mammy [Ana Jackson]), Steve Clemente (Buck Jackson). rel: 24.4.1918. prod: Universal. copy: DCP, 41' (from 35 mm pos. nitr., incompl., 730 m [2395 ft], 18 fps, col., tinting); titles: SPA. source: Cineteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago/Cinemateca del Pacífico.

    Incomplete; the nitrate print is missing 10-15 minutes of the original film’s 5 reels.

    44th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: Rediscoveries.

    Grand piano: Philip Carli.

    Viewed at Cinemazero with e-subtitles in Italian, 11 Oct 2025

  

Richard Abel (GCM 2025): "The Scarlet Drop was the seventh feature film, nearly all westerns, that the young filmmaker Jack Ford directed with Harry Carey as the star. The next film that the two made together was the better-known Hell Bent. The Scarlet Drop was thought lost until an incomplete print was found at the Chilean Film Archive. In its Spanish intertitles, several major characters’ names are changed: Harry becomes Mell, Molly becomes Paulina, Marley becomes Markleo, Betty becomes Alice, and Mammy becomes Ana. A church service also becomes a Catholic Mass."

"The play The Girl of the Golden West (1905), written and directed by David Belasco, provided a crucial scene for Healey and Ford’s scenario: the revelation of the climactic drop of blood. Extremely successful, the play was repeatedly performed, and adapted into a 1910 novel, a 1910 Puccini opera (La fanciulla del West), and 1915 and 1923 silent films. Movie theatres screening the 1923 version introduced it with sometimes elaborate stage prologues of the dance hall/barroom, as in Balaban and Katz’s flagship Chicago theatre and the Strand in Milwaukee, Wisconsin."

"The story begins in Kentucky just prior to the Civil War and then shifts west several years later to the Kansas-Missouri border. “Kaintuck” and his mother are “white trash,” while Molly is the younger daughter favored by old man Calvert who is deathly ill and cared for by Mammy, his “house negro.” “Kaintuck” is so despised by the aristocratic Calverts that Molly’s brother Marley, along with his wealthy neighbor Lyons, refuses to let him join the Confederate forces. Moving west, he meets Quantrill’s Raiders but becomes an outlaw on his own. When Molly travels by stagecoach to visit Marley and Lyons who have partnered in a mine,"

"“Kaintuck” carries her off and they slowly become friendly. Later Lyons discovers Marley is in financial straits and blackmails him into giving him power over Molly. Now the outlaw, of course, comes to the rescue. But in the struggle with Lyons, he is shot and has to hide in an attic room until a “scarlet drop” falls through the floorboards and betrays him to a sheriff and his posse. With Molly and Marley’s help he escapes, and later returns to rejoin them. And that leads to Marley’s shocking revelation about the Calvert family."

"Carey plays “Kaintuck” much like he does “Cheyenne” in other early Ford westerns, but here he initially goes barefoot, even in church. Certain scenes stand out: the deep space of the church interior where Molly befriends his mother; the night lighting when “Kaintuck” enters Quantrill’s camp; the unusual camera angles used to depict his stagecoach hold-up; the climactic fight between “Kaintuck” and Lyons; and the “lights out” darkness that lets him, but not Lyons, escape."

"An item in Exhibitors Herald (May 1918), reported that the Chicago Board of Censors gave The Scarlet Drop an “Adults Only” permit. In early 1919, however, Dorothy Day called Carey a “regular chap” and a favorite of young boys in Des Moines, Iowa; two years later, even in Chicago, Mae Tinée wrote that he was her “idea of a real western hero.” The Chicago Board also demanded half a dozen “cut-outs”: i.e., “shooting man standing in church yard” in Reel 1; all of the stagecoach robbery oddly, “except where girl and bandit are conversing”; and several scenes of the fight in which a “man presses knife towards opponent” in Reel 5. Some of these are not present in the surviving print."

"Following The Phantom Riders (unfortunately still lost), which robes its horseback villains in white hoods and coats reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, The Scarlet Drop makes a more direct critique of the contradictory racial relations defining the Southern aristocracy prior to the Civil War. If old man Calvert apparently frees Mammy from slavery before dying, a letter Marley discovers finally reveals his dark family secret." – Richard Abel

  

AA: As The Scarlet Drop is one of Jack Ford's earliest surviving films, it is striking how many familiar motifs appear immediately in the beginning. Abraham Lincoln in person. The love between mother and son. The contrast between the tramp "Kaintuck" Harry Ridge (Harry Carey) and the Calvert family of Southern aristocrats. The hypocrisy of "pious Christians" in front of the Church (see photo above).

Long before John Wayne appeared as Ethan Edwards, Harry Carey played the antihero or even a villain. The Civil War breaks out. Harry, refused entry to the Confederates, joins the infamous gang of criminals called Quantrill's Raiders, "the scum of both armies", and goes on as a solo outlaw.

The theme of racism runs deep. Not only is this a Civil War story. The haughty Calvert family is hiding a burning secret involving racial lineage.

In passages of Harry's life of crime Ford displays talent as an action director. He has seen the best of the Westerns, such as William S. Hart's The Narrow Trail (US 1917). The hold-up on the mountain road is equally powerfully staged in The Scarlet Drop. The chases are thrilling. Ford works with Ben F. Reynolds, Hart's cinematographer was Joseph H. August. They may have studied each other's work. They know how to compose an electrifying long shot. Determining the horizon is a matter of both realism and metaphysics.

I learn from Richard Abel's program note above that the motif of the scarlet drop was inspired by David Belasco's play The Girl of the Golden West (1905) which had been filmed in 1915 by Cecil B. DeMille. The motif had also been used by D. W. Griffith in The Fight for Freedom (US 1908). The final homage was paid by Howard Hawks in Rio Bravo (US 1959).

Seeing this movie at an edition of Le Giornate dedicated to the Chaplin Connection I can't help thinking about the affinity of Harry the tramp with Charlie the tramp. The poverty, the marginalization, the tattered clothes, the lure of crime. In the beginning, Harry does not even have shoes. NB. Last night we saw Charles Chaplin in Shoulder Arms (US 1918), premiere on 27 Oct 1918. This morning we see Harry Carey in The Scarlet Drop (US 1918), premiere on 24 April 1918.

Fordian and Chaplinian about this is Harry's inner dignity, instantly on display in his tender care of his mother. Harry is despised by the Calverts, who own the town. "But they don't own me".

Shoulder Arms (2025 restoration MoMA)

Charles Chaplin: Shoulder Arms (US 1918). In his dreams, Chaplin is a war hero who defeats Germany, including the Kaiser, single-handedly. Among the Germans raising their hands up: Henry Bergman (below Chaplin) and Albert Austin (in the foreground).

Charlot soldato  / Kivääri olalle vie! / På axel gevär.

    US 1918. 

    Dir: Charlie Chaplin. photog: Roland “Rollie” Totheroh. 

    Cast: Charlie Chaplin (American soldier), Edna Purviance (French farmhouse girl), Sydney Chaplin (soldier comrade; Kaiser), Loyal Underwood (small German officer), Tiny Ward (giant German soldier), Edward Sutherland (soldier reading letter), Tom Wilson (drill instructor; German soldier), Jack Wilson (Crown Prince), Henry Bergman, Albert Austin, Alva D. Blake (various American and German soldiers).

    Prod: Charles Chaplin / First National Pictures. 

    Première: 20.10.1918 (New York). 

    Copy: DCP, 42'41" (from 35 mm, 20 fps). 

    Source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Restored 2025. Special thanks to George Eastman Museum, Danish Film Institute, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre, Bruce Lawton, Metropolis Post, Molten Lava Film Design, Association Chaplin

    Finnish premiere: 23 Dec 1929.

    44th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: The Chaplin Connection.

    Grand piano: Daan van den Hurk. Based on the 1959 score by Charles Chaplin.

    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in English / Italian, 10 Oct 2025

Dave Kehr (GCM 2025): "Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms stands as cinema’s first service comedy, a revolutionary departure from the grim propaganda films saturating theatres in late 1918. While audiences endured lurid melodramas with titles like The Prussian Cur and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, Chaplin offered a comic vision grounded in the recognizable experience of an average enlisted man rather than demonized enemies. Premiered three weeks before the Armistice, this audacious satire transformed potential controversy into universal acclaim by presenting warfare through the lens of shared human absurdity rather than nationalistic fervor. Its influence would prove enduring, establishing a template for military comedy that extended from Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates through to Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H."

"The film emerged from Chaplin’s lucrative First National contract, which afforded him unprecedented creative control. Working with military consultant Corporal O. W. De Varila – who fired the first U.S. artillery shot in France – Chaplin achieved authentic detail in his Hollywood backlot trenches. 

"Released during the catastrophic intersection of World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic, Shoulder Arms provided desperately needed comic relief to traumatized audiences."

"The film’s success in packed theatres – despite public health restrictions – testified to Chaplin’s extraordinary cultural standing and the public’s hunger for cathartic laughter. Trade publications noted the remarkable phenomenon of audiences “taking their lives in their hands” to witness Chaplin’s war dream, making it the top-performing comedy of 1918."

"The film’s enduring power derives from Chaplin’s transformation of the Little Tramp into the archetypal “everyman soldier.” Through brilliantly choreographed sequences – the cheese grater used to scratch imaginary lice, the tree disguise for enemy infiltration, the gramophone horn serving as an underwater breathing tube – Chaplin created a visual vocabulary for military absurdity that resonates across cultures and generations."

"For decades, audiences have watched versions derived from Chaplin’s back-up camera angles and second-choice takes, assembled from degraded C and D negatives after the original A negative deteriorated beyond use. MoMA’s meticulous reconstruction, assembled primarily from surviving prints based on the original A-negative material, reveals an essentially unknown Chaplin film – the version American audiences experienced in 1918."

"The restoration corrects decades of technical distortion, eliminating the jerky motion caused by stretch-printing for sound-era projectors and returning the film to its original 20 frames per second. Subtle but significant variations emerge: camera movements proceed in opposite directions, Chaplin’s performance carries different emotional inflections, and the film’s rhythm reflects Chaplin’s true creative intentions rather than technical compromises." – Dave Kehr

AA: The restored Shoulder Arms was the greatest film I saw at the 2025 Giornate. Familiar and unfamiliar, I have enjoyed and revered this movie since 1983 when I first saw it. That is when I experienced my first full Chaplin First National epiphany (the immortal trio A Dog's Life, Shoulder Arms and The Pilgrim, and the worthy quartet Sunnyside, A Day's Pleasure, The Idle Class and The Pay Day). Step by step Chaplin reached new heights from the 1914 Keystone apprenticeship to the 1915 Essanay ambition to the 1916 Mutual mastery. At First National, in 1918, independent at last, Chaplin fully blossomed as a master of comedy – of the cinema – of modern art.

Famously, Chaplin proved that comedy is at its most powerful when it borders on tragedy. It is also well-known that no audience welcomed his film more warmly than the men at war. 

Many gags I remembered. Now I enjoyed rediscovering the mail sequence where Charlie, the only soldier who gets no mail, reads the letter over a comrade's (Edward Sutherland) shoulder and empathizes with it more than the recipient himself. The camouflage sequence with Charlie as a tree is uncanny in its bizarre identification. 

STARK REDUCTION. The film impresses with the charge of the reduced mise-en-scène.

EXISTENTIAL FEAR. The fear of death is omnipresent. We are in Purgatory, perhaps in Hades already.

THE ABSURDITY OF THE DRILL EXERCISES. Drill exercises as such are close to farce. Chaplin's exaggerations are subtle and assured.

THE TRAMP AS A SOLDIER. The Tramp, the outsider, in the ultimate casting against type as a soldier.

THE ANTI-HERO. Chaplin the consummate acrobat and ballet dancer plays the world's clumsiest soldier: bow-legged, lacking balance and coordination.

SOLITUDE. Everyone else gets mail and food packages, Charlie merely rock hard crackers and cheese good only as a stink bomb. 

HUNGER. No comedian understands hunger like Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and The Gold Rush.

EDNA LIGHTS UP THE SCREEN. In the ruins that used to be her home, we meet Edna Purviance, a reminder of love and tenderness, the meaning of life.

JOY. Writing about wartime Finland, Professor Matti Kuusi wrote that "nothing was more important than joy". Close to death, you don't want sad songs. Joy is the best medicine.

...

WORLD WAR I AND THE ARTS. World War I took glory away from war once and for all. The industrial scale of the slaughter was unheard of. In the aftermath, a profound disillusionment about mankind came about. This disillusionment and the experience of the "lost generation" were fundamental in the genesis of modern art. A break with the past was epochal.

Laughter and slaughter. Chaplin never trivializes. The sense of war and death is serious and apocalyptic. Nobody had tried a comedy like this before. Few have attempted later (Chaplin himself in The Great Dictator and Ernst Lubitsch in To Be Or Not To Be).

THE MUSIC. Daan van den Hurk played an interpretation of Charles Chaplin's 1959 score very well. The music evokes the irrepressible spirit of the hapless soldier. It is amusingly out of touch with the horrors of the war.

THE RESTORATION. In the 2025 MoMA restoration, smoothness of movement and integrity of the best performances has been reinstated for the first time in generations. As for visual quality, the copy screened had a compilation character.

Krylya kholopa / The Wings of a Serf (Pacific Film Archive print)

Yuri Tarich: Krylya kholopa / The Wings of a Serf (SU 1926). Poster design: Anton Mikhailovich Lavinski (1893-1968) and Elizaveta Andreyevna Lavinskaya (1901-1950). Izdatelstvo Sovkino. From Russian Wikipedia.

KRYL’IA KHOLOPA (КРЫЛЬЯ ХОЛОПА) [Le ali del servo/Wings of a Serf] (US: Czar Ivan the Terrible) (not released in Finland) (USSR 1926) dir: Yuri Tarich. scen: Yuri Tarich, Viktor Shklovsky, based on a scenario by Konstantin Shildkret. photog: Mikhail Vladimirsky. ed: Esfir Shub. des: Egor Vladimirov. asst. dir: Vladimir Korsh. cast: Leonid Leonidov (Tsar Ivan the Terrible), Ivan Klyukvin (Nikishka), Sofia Garrel (Fima), Safiyat Askarova (Tsarina Maria Temrkyukovna), Nikolai Vitovtov (Drutskoy), Nikolai Prozorovsky (Fedka Basmanov), Ivan Arkanov (Boyar-Prince Kurlyatev), V. Makarov (Lupatov), Mstislav Kotelnikov (Ivashka), Ivan Kachalov (Malyuta Skuratov), Vladimir Korsh (Tsarevich Ivan), Klavdia Chebysheva (Kurlyatev’s wife), V. Virskaya (Kurlyatev’s daughter), V. Kurganov (Vyazemsky), Ariadna Dzyubina (Hayat). prod: Goskino. rel: 16.11.1926 (Moscow), 3.1928 (Cameo, New York City). 35 mm, 2100 m, 102'10" (18 fps); titles: RUS. source: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA.

    44th Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), Pordenone: Canon Revisited

    Grand piano: Mauro Colombis.

    Viewed at Teatro Verdi with e-subtitles in English / Italian, 10 Oct 2025

Maya Garcia (GCM 2025): "An experimental amalgam of historical materialism and Gothic sensationalism, Wings of a Serf became a notable early success for Soviet film in foreign markets, even as it was criticized and re-cut back in the USSR. Filmed and released in 1926, by the time of its auspicious international run in 1928 Soviet censors were trimming its lurid edges to make a film suitable “for children’s viewing”. American and European censors also demanded significant cuts; the film we have today – reconstructed by Soviet archivists in the 1950s-60s – contains the kinds of sexuality and violence that rarely reached the screen anywhere in the 1920s."

"The tragic tale of a peasant dreamer in Ivan the Terrible’s Muscovy whose mechanical experiments were so far ahead of their time they were denounced as “satanic,” in 1928 Wings of a Serf was already being invoked by Sergei Eisenstein (who was not involved in the film, but close to several who were) as an allegory for the experimental filmmaker’s struggle for creative freedom in the face of state demands being imposed on art. Eisenstein never published the essay in which he likened himself to the film’s protagonist, but those familiar with his life can see how harrowingly accurate that comparison proved. Nikishka is tried for witchcraft by a despotic boyar-prince who recently acquired his entire village in a petty land squabble. His execution is stayed when the boyar-prince’s lands are in turn seized as part of the Tsar’s campaign for centralized autocracy. A royal whim offers Nikishka the chance to resume his experiments with state backing, but the fanatically religious Tsar reacts violently to the results of scientific progress…"

"Wings of a Serf is the creation of a dynamic, diverse early Soviet collective. Director Yuri Tarich is remembered not as a visionary auteur but as a master of orchestrating productive collaborations, including some of the first major Belarusian film productions. He invited extensive input on characterization from Leonid Leonidov, the Moscow Art Theater veteran whose stunningly naturalistic performance as Ivan the Terrible strips away centuries of romantic bombast to expose the petty human on the throne. Esfir Shub, then just beginning to make her name as a pioneer of montage storytelling, credits Tarich with fostering her artistic development by allowing her immense freedom at the editing table. The allegorical dimension of the film invoked by Eisenstein may have emerged collectively from the experiences of these artists navigating a new state system, but there is one collaborator whose personal perspective is clearly evident: Viktor Shklovsky, the prolific theorist whose intellectual signature was the oblique strategy of the “knight’s move”, was then a resident “script doctor” at Goskino, and authored the majority of existing firsthand writing on Wings of a Serf."

"In his journalistic pieces on the film, Shklovsky focused on the aesthetic-ideological struggle to create a new materialist historical film contrary to typical expectations for courtly intrigues and violent thrills. In his memoir Third Factory (Третья фабрика, 1926), he subtly reveals the film’s allegorical dimension. The “wings” of the title are only half of a symbolic system; their counterpart was added to the script by Shklovsky as a way to tether the fanciful flying contraption to a “grounded” historical device, a flax-scutching wheel, which produced the physical material of the wings, linen."

"In Third Factory, Shklovsky recalls the flax-processing center where he first found employment after returning to the USSR from political exile in 1923; he sees the violence that works the coarse plant into useful linen as a metaphor for the conversion of his generation of revolutionary artists into loyal employees of the new state. The prop that gives the film a formal connection to material economy proves a multi-layered symbol: the capricious wheel of fortune that raises the hero up from the dungeon to fleeting prestige as court mechanic; the inhuman machinery of  capital spattered with workers’ blood; and the state torture device on which the heretical wills of former revolutionaries are broken."

"Another element that may have originated in the efforts of the “script doctor” to add historical shading to courtly intrigues has also proven crucial to the film’s symbolic legacy. Several scenes set in the court of Ivan the Terrible showcase one of his most infamous favorites, Fedka (Fyodor) Basmanov. These were the first cinematic reference to Ivan and Fyodor’s long rumored sexual relationship, tearing the veil from that taboo with a flagrancy untempered by the intervening century. At the time of the film’s creation, homosexual relations were recently decriminalized and sexual mores were a hotly debated issue not yet suppressed by the hard conservative turn of the early 1930s. A taste of the contentious but open cultural discourse of the Soviet mid-1920s is offered by a critic in the short-lived journal Kino-Front (no.1, 1927): “In a Soviet historical picture, the important thing is class struggle, not the personality and pathology of the Tsar. In their effort to bring the epoch to life, they diligently depict Ivan the Terrible as a homosexual, even though his homosexuality bears no relation, direct or indirect, to the inventor of the prototype airplane or to the oprichnina.”"

"A more astute observer can see that there are complex relations between the Tsar’s “homosexuality”, his persecution of the blaspheming inventor of “satanic” wings, and his creation of the oprichnina (a proto police-state enforced by a cultlike praetorian guard of oprichniki). Eisenstein was such an observer. When in 1941 he was enlisted to make a new Soviet film epic about Ivan the Terrible, he began constructing an impossible sexual labyrinth, in which his own complicated “bisex” psychology would confront the two-faced monster of a state that stringently regulated sex and gender among civilians while granting sexual license to the ruling elite. Wings of a Serf was a key source of construction material for Eisenstein’s labyrinth, and remains a singular work that demands renewed consideration as both a feat of creative ingenuity and a compelling artifact of a historical moment, whose paradoxes haunt our cultural and political landscape more ominously than ever, one hundred years later." – Maya Garcia

The print 

"We are screening the 35 mm print preserved at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. The PFA acquired the print from Russia’s Gosfilmofond in the early 1970s; it is a duplicate of Gosfilmofond’s own copy, reconstructed sometime in the 1950s-60s, when the Russian titles were recreated. One other copy of the film is known, an original nitrate of a circa 1928 Dutch market cut, preserved at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam."

AA: I see Yuri Tarich's legendary film for the first time, and I guess I'm not the only one. A film all have heard about but few have seen.

First impressions: a high quality production, a lavish historical spectacle, well written, directed,  edited, designed and acted. Full of dense historical detail of manners and mores and physical circumstances of life. Made during the NEP era, Russia's equivalent to Hollywood before the Code. Taboos are casually ignored, including the homosexuality in the private life of Ivan the Terrible.

It is easy to see how this movie may have inspired Eisenstein and Tarkovsky (the balloon prologue in Andrei Rublev). 

The prison system, the torture chambers, the networks of informers and the methods of the oprichnina were familiar for Bolsheviks from their decades in the underground in the Russian Empire. Stalin was already in power when the film was made but it was still ten years to the unleashing of the Great Terror.

The year is 1568. Simultaneous events include the Spanish Inquisition and St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Shakespeare was a contemporary. In Sweden to which Finland belonged we had the Reformation, the Stockholm Bloodbath and brutal succession wars of the children of Gustav Vasa. (In the cinema the era is covered in Sir Arne's Treasure).

I reflect on this context because of the extreme cruelty on display. Such were the times, and not only in Russia. 

The film has a standpoint: it is people's history. It stands by the oppressed serfs - and women who are fair game for the abuse of the boyars. Even the czarina is not safe from the murderous rage of Ivan the Terrible. The mad czar declares also a war on science. He blinds the inventor of the flax-scutching wheel so that nobody else can build one. Nikishka, the inventor of a flying machine, is the only one who can repair the wheel, but he meets his end in Ivan's execution chamber.

Atrocities pile up so that The Wings of a Serf might almost qualify as a horror film. But it does not have horror aesthetics or poetry. Terrible forces are in motion, but there is something unresolved in the formidable dynamics of the story world.

The print is mostly excellent, doing justice to the the fine soft detail of the superb production and cinematography.

Kan ya makan fi Ghazza / Once Upon a Time in Gaza

Arab Nasser & Tarzan Nasser: /كان يا مكان في غزة/ [Kan ya makan fi Ghazza] / Once Upon a Time in Gaza (FR/PS/DE/PT/AE/GB/JO/QA 2025). Majd Ejd (Osama) and Nader Abd Alhay (Yahya).

/كان يا مكان في غزة/ [Kan ya makan fi Ghazza] (The credit title is bilingual in Arabic and English)

France, Palestine, Germany, Portugal, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Jordan, Qatar 2025. PC: Les Films du Tambour etc.

Director: Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser

Starring: Nader Abd Alhay, Majd Eid, Ramzi Maqdisi, Is'haq Elias

    Languages: Arabic

    Loc: Jordan

    87 min

    Distributor: The Party Film Sales, subtitles: English. French distributor: Dulac Distribution.

    World premiere: 19 May 2025 Cannes - Un Certain Regard.

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at Kinopalatsi 1, Helsinki, Sat 27.9.2025 at 18.15–19.42

"This Cannes-awarded drama by Palestinian brothers blends politics and crime cinema — with a Tarantino twist."

"Yahya, a young student from Gaza, meets Osama, a charismatic drug dealer, and together they start selling pills at a falafel kiosk using fake prescriptions. The atmosphere in the prison-like city becomes even more stifling when the corrupt police threaten their operation. Two years later, Yahya ends up starring in the first action movie filmed in Gaza, which reflects the real-life crime he witnessed."

"Tarantinoesque influences on the structure and depiction of violence are present in Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s third film, which won the duo the Best Director Award in this year’s Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section."

"Using satire and genre references, the Nasser brothers explore the impact of friendship, crime, and political conflict on everyday life in Gaza. Whether the film is read as a once-upon-a-time fairy tale or an Italian western based on its title, one thing is sure: the film cannot be read as apolitical. Already the first few minutes send a chill down your spine as we hear Trump against a black background speaking about turning Gaza into a Middle Eastern Riviera. This somber crime film from the heart of darkness will not leave you cold." Otto Kylmälä (translated by Moritz Müller)

"Palestiinalaisveljesten Cannesissa palkittu draama yhdistelee politiikkaa ja rikoselokuvia Tarantino-twistillä."

"Nuori gazalainen opiskelija Yahya tutustuu karismaattiseen huumekauppiaaseen Osamaan, ja yhdessä he ryhtyvät pyörittämään väärennettyjen reseptien avulla pillerikauppaa falafelkioskissa. Vankilalta tuntuvan kaupungin ilmatila muuttuu entistä kuristavammaksi, kun korruptoitunut poliisi uhkaa heidän toimintaansa. Kaksi vuotta myöhemmin Yahya päätyy tähdittämään ensimmäistä Gazassa kuvattua toimintaelokuvaa, joka heijastaa hänen todistamaansa tosielämän rikosta. "

"Tarantinon vaikutus näkyy rakenteessa ja väkivallan kuvauksessa Tarzan ja Arab Nasserin kolmannessa elokuvassa, joka toi duolle parhaan ohjauksen palkinnon tämän vuoden Cannesin elokuvajuhlien Un Certain Regard -sarjassa."

"Satiirin ja genreviittausten keinoin Nasserin veljekset tutkivat ystävyyden, rikollisuuden ja Israelin sortopolitiikan vaikutusta Gazan jokapäiväiseen elämään. Lukeepa elokuvaa sitten sen nimen mukaisesti olipa kerran -satuna taikka italowesterninä, ainakin on selvää, että se on poliittinen. Kylmät väreet tulevat jo ensimmäisinä minuutteina, kun kuulemme mustaa taustaa vasten Trumpin puhuvan Gazan muuttamisesta Lähi-idän Rivieraksi. Tummanpuhuva rikoselokuva pimeyden ytimestä ei jätä kylmäksi." Otto Kylmälä 

AA: Today's viewing menu: from the Quay brothers to the Nasser brothers.

Once Upon a Time in Gaza by the Nasser Brothers was ten years in the making, and the screenplay was finished before the 7 October 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel.

To me, the approach and ambience is unheard-of, but I am intrigued to learn about the tradition of Arab television drama, also known as musalsal (plural: musalsalat), with affinities with the Latin American telenovela. The theatricality allows a range of discourses, from soap opera to political satire. Through all the metacontext, a sense of real life comes through. I realize that also Tarik Saleh's Eagles of the Republic, seen earlier during the Festival, has deep musalsal roots.

While still digesting what I just saw and how to make sense of it, I pay attention to the account of violence since the film's title contains a direct reference to Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. We empathize with the ubiquitous presence of death of innocent civilians under the terror bombings of a militarist invader. The people are not brutalized, and their attitude to violence is the opposite to the gratuitous approach of Sergio and Quentin. For the people of Gaza, there is no entertainment in guns.

The film is a comedy, in the same way as Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. What they suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto they now do to Gaza Ghetto. The comedy is the blackest kind. Not escapist but transcendent.

All protagonists are Gazaites, none are Israelites. There are two parts, each with a different story. The first part, set in 2007, is about the drug smuggler Osama (Majd Eid) caught by the corrupt drug policeman Abu Sami (Ramzi Maqdisi) who requests a cut. (A Finnish viewer can here refer to our Jari Aarnio affair, the drug police chief who doubled as a drug lord). When Osama refuses, Abu shoots him, but there is a hidden witness: Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), a timid student, for whom Osama was a father figure.

The second part focuses on the making of a movie called The Rebel about a patriotic hero, a "Rambo of Gaza". Tongue in cheek, yet with a deadly earnest core. The unlikely casting choice is Yahya, who to the surprise of himself and everybody else rises to the occasion. Through a spoof attitude the film discusses serious matters of discrimination, harassment, settler violence and torture in the hands of the occupation. It also deals with freedom fight and martyrdom. Death in a just cause is preferable to endless insults and humiliation.

The juiciest satirical sequence is a visit of the film production team to the Ministry of Culture of Gaza. The budget of the movie is so small that they cannot afford special effects or visual effects and have to use real guns and live ammunition.

In the final scenes Yahya, who has grown in self-confidence while playing the hero of resistance, defeats Abu Sami in a showdown. In the final battle of the movie production,  a bullet from live fire kills him instantly.

The last title: IT WILL END.

... 

Love & Anarchy the Helsinki International Film Festival dedicates four films to the Free Palestine theme. I would like to see films also devoted to the deeds of Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran. Without them we cannot understand anything about what is going on. 

I would also like to see Israeli films on Palestine. They are being cancelled by the Israeli government. We should not follow the example of that government. I mean films like: 

Dani Rosenberg: The Vanishing Soldier (2023) 

Natalie Braun: Shooting (2025) 

Nadav Lapid: Yes! (2025) 

Shai Carmeli-Pollak: The Sea (2025)

...

Once Upon a Time in Gaza is a showcase of how world history can be telescoped in a low budget film.

What I miss most is the big picture. We live in the age of the instant, and indeed, Instagram, but more than ever we need the opposite, the long arch and the capacity to handle complexity.

The tragedy of the Middle East is one of the most complex in political history. We should start with the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate of Palestine and face the injustice done to Arabs and Jews. Colonial powers set a death trap for both. Everybody who refused asylum for Jews (read Exodus by Leon Uris) shares a responsibility for what is happening today.

...

The slogan "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free" was shouted before the screenings. The slogan is open to interpretation. Among them is the 1988 Hamas charter (the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement), revised in the 2017 charter. The ultimate goal is an Islamic state of Palestine and the destruction of Israel, in 2017 called the Zionist entity. The explicit antisemitism of the 1988 charter was edited away in the 2017 charter.

FROM THE 2017 HAMAS CHARTER: 

2. "Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity."

18. "The following are considered null and void: the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate  Document, the UN Palestine Partition Resolution, and whatever resolutions and measures that derive from them or are similar to them. The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah; it is also in violation of human rights that are guaranteed by international conventions, foremost among them is the right to self-determination."

19. "There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse."

20. "Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.  However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus."

...

Ghazi Hamad

Hamas Political Bureau

LBC TV (Lebanon)

24 October 2023

GHAZI HAMAD: "Israel is a country that has no place on our land.

We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished.

We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.

We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again.

The Al-Aqsa Deluge [7 October] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth... because we have the determination to resolve, and the capabilities to fight.

Will we have to pay a price?

Yes, and we are ready to pay it.

We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.

We did not want to harm civilians, but there were complications on the ground, and there was a party in the area with (civilian) population...

It was a large area, across 40 kilometers...

The occupation must come to an end."

Q: Occupation where? In the Gaza strip?

GHAZI HAMAD: No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.

Q: Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?

GHAZI HAMAD: Yes, of course.

The existence of Israel is illogical.

The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood and tears.

It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period.

Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do.

October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000... everything we do is justified.

https://youtu.be/BJNccvNJtGk?si=7DGHVqqwtwOGT3Sp

https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-official-ghazi-hamad-we-will-repeat-october-seven-until-israel-annihilated-victims-everything-we-do-justified

Sanatorium pod klepsydrą / Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024)

Timothy Quay & Stephen Quay: Sanatorium pod klepsydrą / Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (GB/PL/DE 2024).

Sanatorium pod klepsydrą według braci Quay

United Kingdom, Poland, Germany 2024

Director: Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay

Based on the novel (1937) by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942).

Animation with short live action inserts

Starring: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Allison Bell, Andrzej Klak, Wioletta Kopanska

Languages: Polish

76 min

    Distributor: The Match Factory, subtitles: English

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at WHS Teatteri Union, Helsinki, Sat 27.9.2025 at 16.30–17.46 

The Polish writer and painter Bruno Schulz was murdered by the Nazis on 19 Nov 1942 in the Drohobycz Ghetto in German-occupied Poland.

Previous film adaptation (live action): Wojciech J. Has: Sanatorium pod klepsydrą / The Hourglass Sanatorium (PL 1973). IMDb: "Józef visits his dying father at a remote mental institution, where time itself doesn't seem to exist, and the line between dreams and memories becomes indistinguishable."

Eija Niskanen (HIFF 2025): "The legendary Quay Brothers return with a surreal new ghost story, blending stop-motion animation with a dreamlike train journey through Eastern Europe."

"The twin brothers Timothy and Stephen Quay have spent decades creating their peculiar animations of captivating micro-worlds. Their latest work is their third feature-length film, following the path paved by Street of Crocodiles (1985). Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is also based on the novels of the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz. The Quay brothers were fascinated by Schulz’s masterful use of language and the metaphorical imagery that seemed to detach from reality. Animation provides excellent tools for visualising such imagery."

"Sanatorium is divided into seven episodes, each beginning with looking through the retina of a dead eye. Jozef travels to an Eastern European sanatorium to visit his father, who is half in the realm of the dead, half alive. The story and characters seem to split in two, and the sanatorium reveals itself as a mysterious place full of misleading corridors and labyrinths."

"The Quay brothers spent nineteen years making the film, animating and filming it mostly on their own to a pre-existing musical score. When Polish television joined the production, live-action segments with Polish actors were filmed. Even these transform into dreamlike unreality in the hands of the Quay duo. Seeking a logical narrative is hopeless, but the film flows according to the reasoning of dreams and the subconscious." Eija Niskanen (translated by Kati Ilomäki)

"Legendaaristen Quay-veljesten surrealistinen uutuus on stop motion -animaatiolla maustettu kummitustarina, joka heittää katsojan huuruiselle junamatkalle Itä-Eurooppaan."

"Kaksoisveljet Timothy ja Stephen Quay ovat vuosikymmeniä luoneet omalaatuisia kiehtovien mikromaailmojen animaatioitaan. Uusin niistä on heidän kolmas täyspitkä elokuvansa, joka jatkaa Street of Crocodiles -animaation (1985) viitoittamalla tiellä. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass perustuu niin ikään puolanjuutalaisen Bruno Schultzin romaaneihin. Quay-veljeksiä kiehtoivat Schultzin romaanien taitava kielenkäyttö ja niiden todellisuudesta irtoava metaforinen kuvasto. Niiden visualisointiin animaatio tarjoaa hyvät välineet."

"Sanatorium jakautuu seitsemään jaksoon, jotka alkavat aina kuolleen silmän retinan läpi katsomisesta. Jozef matkustaa jonnekin itäeurooppalaiseen parantolaan tapaamaan isäänsä. Isä on jo puoliksi tuonelan mailla, puoliksi elossa. Tarina ja henkilöt tuntuvat jakaantuvan kahtia, ja parantola paljastuu mystiseksi paikaksi täynnä harhaanjohtavia käytäviä ja labyrintteja."

"Quay-veljekset käyttivät 19 vuotta elokuvan tekemiseen animoiden ja filmaten sen pääosin kahdestaan jo valmiiseen musiikkiin. Puolan television tultua mukaan tuotantoon kuvattiin live-jaksot puolalaisten näyttelijöiden kera. Nekin muuntuvat Quayn parivaljakon käsissä unenomaisen epätodellisiksi. Loogista tarinaa on turha hakea, mutta unen ja alitajunnan logiikalla toimiva elokuva soljuu." Eija Niskanen

IMDb: "A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a man visiting his dying father in a sanatorium to the edge of a mythic forest. Based on the book of the same name by Bruno Schultz."

AA:  The masters of stop motion animation, the Quay Brothers, return in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass to the source of their breakthrough movie Street of Crocodiles (GB 1986): the Polish writer Bruno Schulz.

The movie is image-driven. It is a remarkable achievement in visual art.

I discovered the Quay Brothers (born in America, based in England) via Street of Crocodiles, and at the same time I found their soulmate and predecessor, the Czech stop motion guru Jan Švankmajer (born in 1934, still with us). The brothers had found their style before discovering Švankmajer. In our 1987 spring season we screened a Švankmajer/Quay program curated by Jayne Pilling for the BFI titled "Alchemists of the Surreal". During the same season, Tampere Film Festival mounted a Švankmajer retrospective of their own, and Street of Crocodiles won a prize. The impact was huge in the golden age of the music video, and directors from Terry Gilliam to Christopher Nolan became fans.

Last year was the centenary of surrealism, and after the passing of David Lynch earlier this year we can observe that the legacy is very much alive in the unique cinema of Matthew Rankin (Universal Language) and the Quay Brothers. (Neither of them filming in their native language: Rankin in Persian, the Quays in Polish).

The preposterous plot is a pretext for seven reflections in the dead eye of the voyager's father. But really the movie is a poem about time itself as the original title "sanatorium under the hourglass" announces. Time regained? Certainly not. It's more "time out of joint" to quote Hamlet, the play that has unexpectedly become a key text for this year.

Time is incarnated in the very object world: worn and torn, obsolete, yet conveying history, experience and life lived. This movie, like others in the Švankmajer / Lenica / Borowczyk / Norstein / Quay tradition, has affinities with the Japanese concept of wabi and sabi: the culture of the old and used, therefore connected with the "sculpting in time" aesthetics of Tarkovsky and Sokurov.

On the other hand, there is the lineage of Archimboldo animation: eccentric nature morte installations come alive.

In the middle I felt exhausted (which may have nothing to do with the movie), but the last chapters I found the most inspiring.

It's a treasure trove of imagery, carried by a restless and fecund imagination. It's cosmic and intimate. There are short live action inserts, like homages to late silent cinema of the 1920s. There are also short CGI passages that stand out and not in a good way. Their presence highlights the superior quality of the handcrafted stop motion animation. In it, the brothers are still at their greatest.

The Chronology of Water

Kristen Stewart: The Chronology of Water (US/FR/LV 2025). Lidia Yuknavitch (Imogen Poots).

United States, France, Latvia 2025

Director: Kristen Stewart

Screenplay: Kristen Stewart & Andy Mingo - based on the memoirs (2011) of Lidia Yuknavitch

Starring: Imogen Poots, Tom Sturridge, Thora Birch, Jim Belushi

Language: English

127 min

    Distributor: Les Films du Losange

    Festival premiere: 16 May 2025 Cannes - Un certain regard

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at Kinopalatsi 1, Helsinki, Fri 26.9.2025 at 21.00–23.07 

Rauli Karjalainen (HIFF 2025): "Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut is a fierce and ambitious portrayal of how trauma can ultimately be transformed into art."

"Actor Kristen Stewart’s fierce directorial debut The Chronology of Water is based on American writer Lidia Yuknavitch’s bestselling autobiography of the same name, published in 2011. It’s a fragmented and heavily stylised film that tells the story of an abused competitive swimmer, who goes from having a drug problem into being a successful writer and a mother."

"Imogen Poots throws herself into her raw performance as Lidia, whose life is haunted by sexual abuse and a difficult relationship with her father. Jim Belushi appears as counterculture icon Ken Kesey, from whose writing course Lidia enters to kickstart her writing career."

"The hectic narration digs deep into the conflicts of traumatic relationships. From the first frames, the viewer is sucked into an unpredictable stream, in which trauma, desire, addiction, and writing interlock. The restless editing and reluctant sound design constantly keep the viewer reminded that all is not well."

"The film had its premiere in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes International Film Festival, where the audience received it with a standing ovation. Stewart is also the film’s co-writer beside Andy Mingo." Rauli Karjalainen (translated by Vilja Hynynen)

"Kristen Stewartin debyyttiohjaus on raivokas ja kunnianhimoinen kuvaus siitä, kuinka traumasta voi kasvaa taidetta."

"Näyttelijä Kristen Stewartin raivokas ohjausdebyytti The Chronology of Water perustuu amerikkalaiskirjailija Lidia Yuknavitchin samannimiseen omaelämäkertaan, joka ilmestyi vuonna 2011 ja on ollut myyntihitti. Se kertoo rajun katkelmallisesti ja vahvasti tyylitellen hyväksikäytetyn kilpatason uimarin muodonmuutoksesta huumeongelman kautta menestyneeksi kirjailijaksi."

"Imogen Poots tekee vereslihalle venyvän roolin Lidiana, jonka elämää varjostaa seksuaalinen hyväksikäyttö ja vaikea isäsuhde. Jim Belushi vierailee vastakulttuuri-ikoni Ken Keseynä, jonka ryhmäkirjoituskurssilta Lidia hakee vauhtia kirjoittajanuralleen."

"Kiihkeä ja fragmentaarinen kerronta pureutuu syvälle traumaattisen suhteen ristiriitaisuuksiin. Elokuva upottaa katsojan jo ensikuvista lähtien arvaamattomaan virtaan, jossa trauma, halu, addiktio ja kirjoittaminen lomittuvat. Levoton leikkaus ja vastahankainen äänisuunnittelu muistuttavat alati siitä, että kaikki ei ole hyvin."

"Elokuva sai ensi-iltansa Un Certain Regard -sarjassa Cannesin elokuvajuhlilla, missä yleisö otti sen vastaan seisoaltaan taputtaen. Stewart on myös toinen elokuvan käsikirjoittajista Andy Mingon lisäksi." Rauli Karjalainen

AA: Kristen Stewart's The Chronology of Water is a bold and unconventional growing up saga of a young swimming champion who loses her scholarship because of drug and alcohol addiction. She finds new inspiration in writing and puts her life back together. 

Stewart defies classical storytelling and creates a power flow of memories, sensations and fragments. She defies glamour and tells a visceral story about shock and injury. The Chronology of Water belongs to the territory of experimental cinema.

Stewart was inspired by the memoirs of Lidia Yuknavitch (born 1963 in San Francisco), her training to be an Olympic swimmer thwarted by the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Hers is a tale of domestic violence and sexual abuse leading to a life of drugs and alcoholism. Drunken driving leads to a sentence of hard labour. She gives birth, but the baby is stillborn. In one of the most heartbreaking scenes, Lidia and her man release the tiny sack of ashes into the water. 

Meanwhile, Lidia has met an inspired teacher, Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest incarnated charismatically by James Belushi. Kesey opens her the door to literature and creative writing. There Lidia finds a way to come to terms with her pain and anger. She becomes a writer and a teacher. And a mother.

The Chronology of Water is not narrative cinema. It is a piece of psychedelia, a quest through altered states of consciousness. The expression "stream of consciousness" is literal here, since this is the tale of a swimmer, elliptic and fragmentary, yet with an engrossing flow. We are swept along the furious current without anchor points.

A tale of sound and fury, sensual, physical, leading to redemption. Fundamentally it grows into an exploration into the core of existence.

Imogen Poots gives an extraordinary performance in the leading role.

Kjærlighet / Love

Dag Johan Haugerud: Kjærlighet / Love (NO 2024). Snekkeren (Morten Svartveit),  Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) and Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen) on the ferry.

Norway © 2024 Motlys AS.

Director: Dag Johan Haugerud

Starring: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Marte Engebrigtsen,

Composer: Peder Kjellsby.

Language: Norwegian

120 min

    Distributor: Norwegian Film Institute, English subtitles by Nicolai Herzog.

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at Kinopalatsi 2, Helsinki, Fri 26.9.2025 at 15.45–17.45 

SEX DREAMS LOVE

Sex, 17 Feb 2024 Berlin International Film Festival

Drømmer, 23 Sep 2024 Oslo, 19 Feb 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

Kjærlighet, 6 Sep 2024 Venice Film Festival

In some posters the three films are called the Oslo Trilogy, but the official Oslo Trilogy is by Joachim Trier: Reprise (2006), Oslo, 31. august (2011) and Verdens verste menneske (2021). Also three films by Erik Poppe have been called an Oslo Trilogy: Schpaaa (1998), Hawaii, Oslo (2004) and De usynlige (2008).

Sanni Myllyaho (HIFF 2025): "Give way, Paris – Oslo is now the city of love. The summer night is full of possibilities, as strangers seek eye contact with each other on a ferry in the Oslo archipelago. In Dag Johan Haugerud’s film Love, Marianne, a doctor specialised in urology, and her nurse co-worker, Tor, are both exploring what it’s like to have your own kind of love life."

"Marianne is fully content with her life as a self-reliant woman, when her friend sets her up with a geologist, with whom sparks suddenly start flying. However, at their age everyone has their baggage. The geologist has his children, and as a neighbour his ex-wife, who enjoys wine a little too much. Marianne isn’t sure whether she wants to be a part of any of it. Tor, for one, only likes casual sex, until caring and affection start creeping into one of his encounters."

"Love is the second part of Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, consisting of independent films (or third part, depending on Haugerud’s mood during the interview). Where the first part, Sex (R&A 2024 and 2025), showcases manhood and sexuality, Love fantasises what loving and wanting can look like at an older age, if you don’t let society’s expectations restrain you."

"Haugerud’s films (I Belong, R&A 2013; Beware of Children, R&A 2020) examine relationships cleverly and without judgement, and are always an occasion for the fans of mild-mannered dramas. Love is no exception." Sanni Myllyaho (translated by Vilja Hynynen)

"Väisty Pariisi, Oslo on nyt rakkauden pääkaupunki. Kesäyö on täynnä mahdollisuuksia, kun Oslon saariston yhteyslautalla haetaan katsekontaktia vieraiden ihmisten kanssa. Urologian erikoislääkäri Marianne ja tämän työpari, sairaanhoitaja Tor tutkivat kumpikin tahoillaan, minkälaista on elää omannäköistä rakkauselämää Dag Johan Haugerudin elokuvassa Love."

"Marianne on täysin tyytyväinen elämäänsä itsellisenä naisena, kunnes ystävän järjestämällä tapaamisella geologin kanssa yllättäen kipinöi. Tässä iässä itse kullakin on kuitenkin painolastinsa. Geologilla on lapset ja naapurina ex-vaimo, jolle viini maistuu vähän liian hyvin, eikä Marianne ole varma, haluaako hän mitään osaa heistä. Tor taas vannoo irtoseksin nimeen, kunnes erääseen kohtaamiseen alkaa sekoittua huolenpitoa ja välittämistä."

"Love on Haugerudin itsenäisistä elokuvista koostuvan Oslo-trilogian toinen osa (tai kolmas riippuen siitä, millä tuulella Haugerud on haastattelua antaessaan). Siinä missä ensimmäinen osa Sex (R&A 2024 & 2025) käsittelee mieheyttä ja seksuaalisuutta, Love fantasioi, mitä rakastaminen ja haluaminen voivat olla varttuneemmalla iällä, jos yhteiskunnan odotusten ei anna rajoittaa."

"Haugerudin (I Belong, R&A 2013; Lapset, R&A 2020) ihmissuhteita älykkäästi ja tuomitsematta tarkkailevat elokuvat ovat aina tapaus vähäeleisten draamojen ystäville, eikä Love ole tässä poikkeus." Sanni Myllyaho

AA: The main action in the films in Dag Johan Haugerud's trilogy is conversation, but each has also great imagery. In Sex the protagonists are chimney sweeps and thus we have the rooftops, the sky and the horizon. In Dreams, there is the contrast between urban Oslo architecture and the magic of the forest. In Love, the most memorable visual motif is the ferry. A main character is a geologist, and we get a discourse on Oslo geology. The rock solid foundation of the city and the Atlantic seafront are the key elements of the vision.

Éric Rohmer was asked the question why people talk so much in his movies, and his answer was simply that the people whom he knows love to talk, so what would be more natural than to have a lot of dialogue. Haugerud's films are based on the same conviction. When people start to talk they reveal more of themselves than they may realize, and in dialogue they may get insights which might otherwise have remained unexplored.

Love is the best and most profound movie in Haugerud's trilogy. Sex was about the fluidity of orientation: even if you are heterosexual does not mean that you cannot feel the other way. Dreams was about the awakening of young sexuality, still groping in the darkness. It was also about the zone of transgression and the professional limits of abstinence of the grown-up. 

Love is about the life of unattached grown-ups in the world of Tinder and Grindr. It also discusses the professional's duty of avoiding transgression, this time with a patient. The urologist Marianne's life as a child of divorce may explain her unwillingness to become attached. She hesitates to have a relationship with a father of small children. She acts out of character and has a one night stand with a casual acquaintance. Her colleague, the gay nurse Tor has been a swinger all his life, but he starts a serious non-sexual affair with a patient, Bjørn, whose cancerous prostate has been operated.

Through Tor, Marianne learns about male trouble related to the prostate: it is essential in penetrative gay sex. To lose it is a double loss. Through Bjørn we learn about gay history. Just when Bjørn came out in 1988, news about AIDS became widespread. Now, just as he has lost his prostate, there are news about a new HIV vaccine.

A touch of humor emerges from the reactions of Marianne's best friend Heidi, who in the beginning seems like a spirit of liberation in her introduction to Oslo as a city of love. She acts as the matchmaker between Marianne and the geologist Ole Harald and is shocked to learn that Marianne distances herself from him and instead enjoys a one night stand with Snekkeren, the carpenter.

It is about free love and committed love. Love is serious business, and most serious when children are involved.

The End (2024)

Joshua Oppenheimer: The End (DK/SE/IE/DE/IT/GB 2024). The world has ended. Mother (Tilda Swinton) and Father (Michael Shannon) mount a masquerade in their underground lair.

AA: Joshua Oppenheimer's The End is about the age of denial. We know that there is no future in the way we live now, yet go on living like before.

Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, United States 2024

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

Cinematographer: Mikhail Krichman – 2.35:1

Starring: Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Bronagh Gallagher

Costume design: Frauke Firl. Tilda Swinton had access to the entire Chanel archive.

Art credits: The End belongs to films where an extensive list of art is displayed and credited. The credit list flashes by so fast that it is impossible to read. Included are:

– C. W. Eckersberg (1783-1853): Studie af skyer over Øresund / Study of Clouds over the Sound (1826). Oil on canvas. 322 x 441 mm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

– Vilhelm Hammershøi: Kvinde set fra ryggen / Woman Seen from the Back (1888). Oil on canvas. 635 x 555 mm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

– American luminist landscape painters Albert Bierstadt and Martin Johnson Heade. "We chose American luminist paintings, to serve as windows onto a lost nature that never really existed. But the key to American luminism is that you don’t see the brushstrokes." (Oppenheimer).

– The French Impressionists Monet, Morisot and Renoir.

Composers: Marius De Vries, Josh Schmidt

Lyrics: Joshua Oppenheimer, turning prose poems into songs in collaboration with the composer Josh Schmidt

148 min

    Languages: English, French

    Distributor: Danish Film Institute, Making Movies, Scandinavian Film Distribution, subtitles: partly English

    World premiere: 31 Aug 2024 Telluride.

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    Viewed at Savoy-teatteri, Thu 25.9.2025 at 17.45–20.13 

Telluride Film Festival 2024: Jason Silverman: "In Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic story, a wealthy family, living underground in a palatial bunker, goes through its daily motions. Mother (Tilda Swinton), Father (Michael Shannon) and their 20-year-old son (George MacKay)—who has never seen the outside world—read, redecorate the rooms, swim laps and keep up appearances, even with no one looking. They’ve survived the destruction of the civilized world—a crime in which Father played a key role—and have been able to avoid contemplating the damage they’ve done. And then, a stranger arrives. How can they express their feelings, hidden underground? They sing. What? Oppenheimer (whose films ACT OF KILLING and LOOK OF SILENCE revolutionized the documentary form) has created a Golden Age musical for an unthinkable era, a time not so different from ours. Modest and extravagant, a miniature and a megalith, THE END is a considered masterpiece. –JS (Ireland-Germany-Italy-Sweden-Denmark-UK, 2024, 148m) In person: Joshua Oppenheimer, Signe Byrge Sørensen, George MacKay, Moses Ingram, Michael Shannon"

Otto Kylmälä (HIFF 2025): "Tilda Swinton dazzles in Joshua Oppenheimer’s satirical anti-musical, which follows a family that has fled the post-apocalyptic world into a luxury bunker."

"25 years after the environment collapsed, a mother, father and son are living in isolation in a luxury bunker in the bowels of a salt mine, clinging to hope and the remains of a normal life by repetitive routines. All things run their course until a young woman enters the family’s closed world."

"Instead of feeling claustrophobic, the bunker home is adorned with valuable paintings and elegant decorative objects. The impressionist masterpieces, however, are not windows to the outside world, but distorted snapshots, like the worldview of the people who have been living underground for decades. To stay sane, the inhabitants of the bunker have been recycling the same stories and lies, but the arrival of the woman reveals the tensions simmering beneath the surface, and the family’s seemingly harmonious life gradually begins to unravel."

"Having drawn on genres and styles in his award-winning documentaries The Act of Killing (R&A 2013) and The Look of Silence (R&A 2014), Oppenheimer now uses the musical to create satirical layers to his post-apocalyptic survival story. The escapist genre is an ingenious way to depict people trying to keep up appearances and live on the edge of a devastated world as if nothing has happened. The world burns and “all is well.“" Otto Kylmälä (translated by Moritz Müller)

"Tilda Swinton säväyttää Joshua Oppenheimerin satiirisessa antimusikaalissa, joka seuraa post-apokalyptista maailmaa luksusbunkkeriin karannutta perhettä."

"25 vuotta ympäristön romahtamisen jälkeen äiti (Tilda Swinton), isä (Michael Shannon) ja poika (George MacKay) elävät eristyksissä ylellisessä bunkkerissa suolakaivoksen uumenissa pitäen kiinni toivosta ja normaalin elämän rippeistä toistuvien rutiinien avulla. Kaikki rullaa omalla painollaan, kunnes heidän suljettuun maailmaansa saapuu nuori nainen (Moses Ingram)."

"Seurueen bunkkeri ei tunnu klaustrofobiselta, vaan tyylikkäästi sisustetun kodin seiniä koristavat arvotaulut ja elegantit koriste-esineet. Impressionismin mestariteokset eivät kuitenkaan ole ikkunoita ulkomaailmaan, vaan vääristyneitä kuvajaisia, kuten vuosikymmeniä maan alla asuneiden ihmisten maailmankuvakin. Pysyäkseen järjissään bunkkerin asukkaat ovat kierrättäneet samoja tarinoita ja valheita, mutta naisen saapuminen paljastaa pinnan alla kytevät jännitteet, ja perheen näennäisen harmoninen elämä alkaa vähitellen hajota."

"Palkituissa dokumenttielokuvissaan The Act of Killing (R&A 2013) ja The Look of Silence (R&A 2014) tyylittelyä ja genre-elementtejä hyödyntänyt Joshua Oppenheimer käyttää musikaalia luomaan satiirisia tasoja post-apokalyptiseen selviytymistarinaansa. Eskapistinen lajityyppi on nerokas tapa kuvata ihmisiä, jotka yrittävät ylläpitää kulisseja ja elää tuhoutuneen maailman reunalla kuin mitään ei olisi tapahtunut. Maailma palaa ja ”kaikki on hyvin”." Otto Kylmälä

IMDb: "Joshua Oppenheimer described the film as an exploration of whether we as human beings can come to a place where our guilt is too much to recover from our pasts."

Wikipedia definition: "an apocalyptic musical film". 

Wikipedia lists 16 films sharing the title The End.

Opening motto:

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

– from T. S. Eliot: Four Quartets (1943) [East Coker, 1940]

AA: Joshua Oppenheimer has compared his movie with Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall (Der Untergang, DE/AT/IT 2004) about the last days of Hitler. He has also said that we already live in the bunker.

It's the story of the last family on Earth, 25 years after the end of the world. They live in a luxury hideaway in an abandoned saltmine. It resembles a James Bond villain's lair. The walls are lined with the greatest art. They have a cook (Bronagh Gallagher), a butler (Tim McInnerny) and a doctor (Lennie James) who keeps them medicated with sleeping pills and antidepressants. 

There is a swimming pool, a greenhouse and an aquarium. The 20 year old son (George MacKay) was born here and has never been elsewhere. He builds a diorama about the Western Civilization under the Hollywood sign. He has all the time in the world. Guided by the doctor they conduct emergency rehearsals.

We don't know their names, but the mother (Tilda Swinton) is a former Bolshoi ballerina and the father (Michael Shannon) used to be one of the greatest oil tycoons. The grand piano should be tuned. The vintage wine has lost its flavour. The son is ghostwriting his father's memoirs in which he explains away his responsibility in the apocalypse. 

They carry Magnum firearms and do target practice in case an intruder appears. Exactly that happens, when a young Black girl (Moses Ingram) is found lying exhausted in the tunnel. According to the family protocol, she should be expelled, but she does not give up, and is invited to join.

In her presence everything needs an explanation, and repressed traumata come to the fore. They are too much for the cook, who requests a little pill from the doctor and is found dead in the morning. On the other hand, the Son, who has never seen a woman of his own age before, develops tender feelings with the Girl. In the finale there is a celebration. The Mother and the Father are now proud grandparents.

Like Emilia Pérez and Armand, The End belongs to the peculiar "back to the musical" trend in contemporary cinema. It belongs also to an appealing tradition of film directors as songwriters. 

It is stimulating to view The End and even more stimulating to read Oppenheimer's interviews. Immediately after the film I do not know what to think about it. The vision is powerful and Oppenheimer's mission is the greatest. Musical eccentricity does not save it from being boring. It is more stimulating afterwards. Like medicine: not good, but good for us.

In all his films Oppenheimer wants to expose our inherent tendency to lie. Like on the eve of the First World War we are sleepwalkers just when we should wake up. Our tendency to lie now leads to final destruction. Our greatest hope is in children and the young people. But nobody can remain complacent. Unless we fight, we are complicit. This is no time to be divisive. Everybody must be welcome.

E (in person: Anna Eriksson)

Anna Eriksson: E (FI 2025). Shot in the Kalahari desert.

Finland 2025.

Director: Anna Eriksson

Starring: Anna Eriksson, Parco Lee, Johrne Van Huyssteen, Jooseppi Pyykkö, Johannes Haasbroek

Languages: English, Swedish

86 min

    Distributor: Pirkanmaan elokuvakeskus, subtitles: Finnish, English

    Love & Anarchy 38th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF)

    In person: Anna Eriksson. Hosted by Pekka Lanerva. With Juha Elomäki, Matti Pyykkö, Vivan Manat, Elia Husten, Marlena Gröngård, Parco Lee, Jooseppi Pyykkö, Elina Pelin, Tuomas Seppänen, Teijo Pellinen, Pietari Kaakkomäki. [spelling unchecked]. Q&A hosted by Mari Mantela.

    Viewed at Kinopalatsi 1, Helsinki, Wed 24.9.2025 at 18.30–19.56

Joonas Nykänen (HIFF 2025): "In the climax of Anna Eriksson’s film trilogy, Finland’s former Prime Minister causes a scandal at the Nobel Gala and vanishes into the desert of reality."

"Anna Eriksson’s latest work of art, E, the climax of her letter trilogy. The electric nightmare peppered with self-aware dark humour brings some much needed nervous vibrations into Finnish cinema, a restlessness reminiscent of von Trier, Lynch, Denis, Bergman and even Żuławski."

"Rhythm, soundscape, shot composition. Models. Unlike anything we’ve seen before in our periphery. Eriksson’s work is on a stellar plane of its own: unique and endlessly fascinating. More distilled emotion than feigned sentimentality, more a stick of dynamite than ordinary sticky art."

"As a film about dunes, it far surpasses the recent overinflated Hollywood spectacles. E is a reminder that much before all that commercial nonsense films like Woman in the Dunes (1964) were made."

"Eriksson’s film is something completely different from the harmless dreams we are used to seeing in Finnish cinema. Merely the fact that it does not attempt to cheaply dilute children’s Hollywood fluff is a delightful promise about the new direction of Finnish film as something other than an echo of American cinema." Joonas Nykänen (translated by Adrian Murtomäki)

"Anna Erikssonin elokuvatrilogian huipennuksessa Suomen ex-pääministeri aiheuttaa skandaalin Nobel-gaalassa ja katoaa todellisuuden autiomaahan."

"Anna Erikssonin tuorein taideteos E, kirjaintrilogian kliimaksi, sähköinen painajainen, jonka pimeä huumori uskaltaa nauraa itselleen, tuo kotimaiseen elokuvaan kaivattua hermostunutta väreilyä, samankaltaista levottomuutta, jota voi löytää von Trieriltä, Lynchiltä, Denisiltä, Bergmanilta tai jopa Żuławskilta."

"Rytmi, äänimaisema, kuvasommittelu. Mallit. Mitään tällaista emme ole vielä periferiassamme aiemmin nähneet. Erikssonin teos on täysin oma tähtensä: omaperäinen ja pohjattoman mielenkiintoinen. Enemmänkin tislattua tunnetta kuin teeskenneltyä tunteilua, enemmänkin TNT:tä kuin tavallista tahnaista taidetta."

"Se on myös dyynielokuvana mielenkiintoisempi kuin tuoreimmat ylipitkät Hollywood-dyynitehostespektaakkelit. E muistuttaa, että paljon ennen tuota kaupallista höttöä tehtiin sellaisiakin elokuvia kuin Dyynien daami (1964)."

"Erikssonin elokuva on jotain muuta kuin sitä harmitonta unta, johon olemme kotimaisessa elokuvassa tottuneet. Jo siinä, ettei se lähde halpahintaisesti laimentamaan lapsille suunnattua Hollywood-hattaraa, on ilahduttava lupaus kotimaisen elokuvan uudesta suunnasta muunakin kuin yhdysvaltalaisen elokuvan kaikuna ja kopiona." Joonas Nykänen

AA: Anna Eriksson's E is a desert movie, and this desert looks different from the others.

Eriksson and her cinematographer husband Matti Pyykkö only show the desert, never the sky.

William K. Everson commented on the two greatest masters of the Western by saying that in William S. Hart's cinema land (often a desert) is the dominant motif and the skyline is high in the frame. With John Ford, the skyline is low, and the action unfolds under a wide open sky.

In E, there is no sky at all. No higher powers. No transcendence.

Eriksson & Pyykkö only shot at dusk. This is no dazzling brilliant Sahara desert like in Lawrence of Arabia or Io capitano.

In modern and modernist cinema, the desert was a prominent landscape-soulscape particularly in Michelangelo Antonioni's movies Il deserto rosso, Zabriskie Point and Profession: Reporter. The last mentioned is also, like E, about a loss of identity and doubles. The void has a multiple meaning. It reflects the emptiness of contemporary life but also a freedom and purity from which something new may emerge.

I was intrigued about the meaning of Eriksson's letter trilogy M - W - E. I was thinking about Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders, filmed by Frank Tashlin as The Alphabet Murders. Those murders are linked to double initials, as were the subsequent real-life Alphabet murders (the Double Initial murders). But I was also thinking about Georges Perec's Oulipo novel Life: A User's Manual with its letter games.

In the Q&A after the screening, Mari Mantela asked Eriksson the question, and the answer was L'Hôpital de la Salpêtrière. Eriksson had been impressed by Asti Hustvedt's book Medical Muses: the Culture of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2011) in which it turns out that the patients were called by a capital letter only.

This gets me to thinking about the trilogy again. M was about a parallel being to Marilyn Monroe, though clearly not her. The protagonist of W was Madame Europa. The main person of E is Eva Vogler, a public figure who has stopped speaking like Elisabet Vogler in Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Bergman was fascinated by the fact that "persona" means "mask". Eriksson is fascinated by another Jungian concept, "the shadow", who can take over, with the consequence that we transform into a shadow of our former self. This takeover is acute in contemporary "social media".

Eva Vogler seems to be a parallel being or parasite for Sanna Marin, in a ludicrous way. I do not know what to think about this. Is this about a woman being a wolf to a woman? It does not make sense. But this is about a parallel reality / unreality, in which the Nobel Peace Prize gala has been transferred from Oslo to Stockholm.

I, the incorrigible sociologist, think that 19th century hysteria such as treated at la Salpêtrière, was a valid reaction to the oppression of women at the time: no political rights, no property rights, education restricted, many professions off limits, husband in charge of everything, with no safe contraception or abortion, rape and harassment unbridled. Men were free to explore, women, who mature earlier, were repressed in their natural desire for happiness.

The opening involves the anasyrma: exposing one's genitals or derrière with the intention of disgrace and outrage. (We only hear about it. The film never leaves the desert.) Anasyrma is an ancient tradition, also in Finnish heritage and culture (here called harakointi), famously in Aleksis Kivi's play The Betrothal, where Herrojen Eeva exposes her yoni to the horrified menfolk. In the cinema the part was played by the formidable Mirjami Kuosmanen, known to her closest by the nickname "Hurjami" [untranslatable, it means "the wild one"].

Anna Eriksson is "Hurjami" reincarnated.

Erik Blomberg: Kihlaus / The Betrothal (FI 1955). Herrojen Eeva (Mirjami Kuosmanen) performs the anasyrma / harakointi to Tailor Eenokki (Heimo Lepistö).