Seasoned director Ville Suhonen’s (Seamstress, 2015, Price of Peace, 2021) masterfully crafted essay film is much akin to Peter von Bagh’s brilliant Socialism (2014), dealing with state-run propaganda machines.
“What happened in the last months before the beginning of the Continuation War? Before Finland attacked?” The film begins in the time after the Finnish Civil War and ends in death and choir song. The documentary shows with a keen eye how the state sows the seeds of propaganda, starting with those who are most susceptible to influence from their environment.
“I wanted to make this film to convey through image and sound how my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were not asked about future plans when they were children,” Suhonen writes. As the style has been rid of many of the burdens of documentary conventions, like having a narrator to explain everything (Alma Pöysti and Olavi Uusivirta, among others, read archive materials!), we get to the heart of the film: montage.
Through montage we witness the Finnish militaristic upbringing. The clear and concise work presents how one ideological machine operates. To quote Hegel: “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
Joonas Nykänen