One of Markku Lehmuskallio’s most endearing qualities is his aesthetic versatility and curiosity: Film for film, it seems, he tries out a different way of telling his story. Quite predictable, in contrast, is the world he (often in tandem with his wife Anastasia Lapsui) explores: that of the people living in the tundra and/or the ice – be that in Finland, the Soviet Union, or now Russia, or in the case of Inuksuk, Canada.
Inuksuk is among his less known works, probably because it is formally a truly difficult to pinpoint piece. On the one hand, it’s firmly rooted in realism, with some documentary touches; on the other, a certain dream-like atmosphere starts to add unexpected layers of meaning and emotions, incl. sometimes a bit of silliness. That the acting is broad and the dialogues often get delivered in an unsubtle fashion is part of the plan – for how else but in a full frontal fashion could people of different linguistic backgrounds communicate, if their thoughts and observations don’t simply vanish in thin air by being spoken in a tongue only one of them knows?
An “inuksuk,” by the way, is a cairn used for all kinds of navigation, from traveling via herding to food caches. It seems they could also be places of religious importance. Whatever they were exactly, for whom, and at what point in time, they guided the way. It’s the kind of marker we all need.
Olaf Möller