The seafaring story about the travails of 17-year-old Jalmar ”Jallu” Yrjänen deepens into a tragic reminder of the finite nature of life in relation to the surrounding elements in Milja Viita’s collage documentary. The film splices cinefilms of sailors casting off from the town of Rauma to travel the world between the 1960s and 1990s with letters, telegrams and logbook markings from the early 20th century. Spanning its narrative over several decades, the film was commissioned by Rauma’s Lönnström Art Museum.
If depictions of manual labour or its division isn’t enough to entice the viewer to cross oceans, by the time the narrator catalogues the contents of his duffel bag while the ship is rocking uncontrollably even the most ardent landlubber will be convinced of being in the same boat with Jallu. The diary structure of the beginning broadens its relevance by the finale’s collage epilogue and the fate of Jallu dying in a shipwreck expands from a personal tragedy into a part of the wider history of seafaring.
Taika Marttinen