New Antero Alli Film Has Finnish Theme
Comments by Harri Siitonen
Antero Alli,
Finnish-American independent film-maker, has just produced his first full-length
feature film with a Finnish theme: Under Shipwrecked Moon – A
Fable of Love, Death & Hedgehogs. Antero and Sylvi Alli's Vertical
Pool Productions in the two preceding years introduced two other quality
feature films, Tragos and Hysteria. But as is unfortunate
with low budget film-makers, they've never received the wide circulation
they deserve.
Shipwrecked Moon is basically the story of Finland-born Esko Hietanen, who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances fifteen years before, leaving the lives of his family in disarray. He took the assets of the import-export firm he ran jointly with his brother Oscar Hietanen with him. The impetus for his leaving was the feeling of grief and guilt over the death of his only son Timo, a sea captain who was shipwrecked in the Bering Sea. He leaves Timo's grieving wife Rakel in wonderment and and anger as well as his doting young grandson Jari, who becomes a rock musician and a practicing shaman. Fireworks flare up when Esko returns home to the San Francisco Bay Area, unannounced from his long exile, to make amends to his family but dies before he can communicate with them.
The film
is basically about the power, love and strength of family, no matter how
dysfunctional it is. There is also a tender, sensitive love story between
Jari and his young wife Madeline. There is realism, but also a touch of
the surreal, dream states and mysticism in Shipwrecked Moon. A
powerful force throughout is the enigmatic Sisu (played by Alli's wife
Sylvi), who permeates the story with a mystical, shamanistic presence.
In another sense she is also the young Saami female shaman who Esko was
enamored by as a young man, and who died young.
In many ways, there are suggestions of a Kalevalan spirit throughout Shipwrecked
Moon. Animal spirits seen as ravens and hedgehogs dance around on
a giant chessboard. The cinematography is excellent, changing continually
along with the moods of the story. This is not a megabucks Hollywood production,
but who needs Disney when such fabulous work can be done with simple,
basic camerawork and editing,
Arranged
by the talented Sylvi Alli, there is a rich musical track throughout the
film, featured by her own unique rendition of Sibelius' Finlandia on the
piano.
Starring
in the show are Gabriel Carter, Felicia Faulkner, Richard C. Goodman,
Lea Bender, Sylvi Alli, Clody Cates and Alan Reade. Director: Antero Alli.
At this time,Shipwrecked Moon will be shown in art houses in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. It would be wonderful if it could be seen in other places with sizeable Finnish-American communities. Hopefully, it'll have a breakthrough in the film festival circuit. It's worth all of it!
Screenings of Shipwrecked Moon
Thurs. May 29 at 9pm @CELLspace in San Francisco, 2050 Bryant Street (near 18th St., Potrero district) -- World Premiere
$6.-10. sliding scale AT THE DOOR -- Filmmaker in person
Thurs. June 5 at 9pm @21 Grand in Oakland
449-B 23rd St., nr. Telegraph (click above link for directions) East Bay premiere. $6.-10. sliding scale AT THE DOOR -- Filmmaker in person
Fri. June 13 at 8pm @911 Media Arts in Seattle
117 Yale Ave. N (near Denny & Stewart) Seattle premiere. $6. admission AT THE DOOR -- Filmmaker in person.
Sun. June 15 at 7:30 pm @The Oracle, Port Townsend WA. 1033 Lawrence. $6. -$10. admission AT THE DOOR -- Filmmaker in person.
Fri. June 20 at 9pm @ Hollywood Theatre in Portland. 4122 NE Sandy Blvd (NE Broadway & 41st Ave) Portland premiere. $5. admission AT THE DOOR -- Filmmaker in person.
Harri
Siitonen – actor, sports enthusiast, and translator – has
written about Antero Alli and his filmmaking previously in the New
World Finn.
Finnish Genes, Filmmaking & Shamanism
by Antero Alli ©2003
Last November I turned fifty and to be honest, I never thought I'd make it this far. Not in a million years. Life has been complex, troubling, mystifying yet also strangely blessed. If I were to view mine from the pitch black skies beyond time and space, I'd see an ultra-slow motion shipwreck in progress unfolding the grandeur, terror, beauty, tragedy, and serenity of its inevitable fate. Dramatic? Perhaps. Uncommon? Not really. I think anyone totally honest with him-or-herself might see and say something similar. Failure is not the enemy; stupidity is – especially the stupidity of repeating the same failures. In learning from failures, I have discovered a success in the freedom to make new mistakes. My work as a filmmaker depends on it.
As is probably common with others around my age, I have also been looking back to my roots to understand my present-time circumstances better. Not as an idea or an image or some personal issue of pride but rather, how a larger cultural and genetic influence has shaped my life without me knowing it.
A little personal history. Though I was born in Finland and retain Finnish citizenship, my life seems to have unfolded as a hybrid of old-world matriarchy and west-coast subcultures. In 1955, we (my mother, grandmother, brother and I) abandon my father in Helsinki and migrate to Toronto, where we stay for seven years before one final journey westward to Los Angeles on May 23, 1962. Here my ambitious mother Kaija establishes her career as a successful photo-journalist interviewing Hollywood icons; grandma Rakel finds steady employment as a physical therapist. Meanwhile, my younger brother and I have the time of our young lives as teenage hippies during the psychedelic sixties. We also share the fate of being raised by two strong Finnish women.
My earliest personal history and Suomi genes continue influencing life today, in ways both obvious and mysterious. The most recent manifestation is the production of my fifth independent (self-produced) feature movie, Under a Shipwrecked Moon. Perhaps my most personal and ambitious
project to date, the story follows an elderly Finn, Esko Hietanen (played by John K. Roberts), who leaves his family after the tragic drowning of his only son Timo, in the hopes of starting an anonymous new life "somewhere nobody knows my name". After fifteen years of being away, he finally returns to the family he abandoned.
On the morning of his surprise family visit, Esko succumbs to a stroke and drifts into a coma in the motel room where the maid finds him. He is transported to the hospital, where his family is alerted and soon arrive with their own questions and grievances.
Meanwhile, Esko's inner life becomes very active with bizarre dreams and memories of a young tietaja (shaman) he fell in love with over fifty years ago who now beckons him towards death and beyond (played by Sylvi Alli as Sisu). Will he return to the family fold or follow his long lost love? I won't tell you what actually happens in case you have a chance to see the movie for yourself.
Esko's story is also Jari's story; Jari is Timo's son and Esko's grandson (played by Gabriel Carter). When Timo drowned in the shipwreck, Jari was ten years old. At the time, Esko took Jari aside and told him that "no matter how tough life would get, you are a warrior spirit with power to handle any situation." Though he knew he could not prove his claims, Esko also told young Jari that he was a "fourth generation Saami shaman" because "your real grandmother would have told you so if she was here." Being the impressionable lad he was, especially around his favorite grandpa, Jari takes his vision quest seriously and sets a course towards creating his own shamanic ritual tradition. The purpose of his rituals: to enter the spirit world and find his father, wherever he may be.
With all due respect to Saami shamanic culture, I never set out to mimic those ancient traditions or to make a "shamanic movie" yet somehow this archetype found its way into the heart of my story. Was it the Saami in my own genes? Or something I ate years ago? Though I have long since stopped any drug use (beyond fine wine), I do recall my teenage years in the psychedelic sixties with its countless visionary trips induced by various psychoactive agents. The supernatural beauty and infinite complexity of life, as revealed in those experiences, forced me to live "as a warrior spirit", if only to fight for my sanity and personal truth amidst a society that defined my "vision quests" as immoral and illegal. To live as a warrior spirit meant to live more honestly, to learn how to see and think for myself and, arrive at my own conclusions, whether they are right or not. I never consciously tried to "be a shaman" yet, at the risk of sounding pretentious, perhaps I've been living by an, albeit urban, shamanic code all this time.
As a filmmaker, I am constantly searching for new ways to share my perceptions and feelings with the world through stories, characters, music and a myraid of visual and audio effects. With this new movie, Under a Shipwrecked Moon, the character of Jari smokes an undefined substance as part of his shamanic ritual.
The effect catapults his consciousness out-of-body where his spirit transforms into a raven-man who enters the dreams of his grandfather. This sounds like a shamanic initiation ritual, to me; one of invoking the dreams of the ancestors. (By the way, I don't know if there is such a drug that does this but hey – this is a fiction film, not a documentary, and so I have let my imagination fly.)
The cinematic challenge here was to create a visual, musical and sonic experience for the audience to represent Jari's mystical states. Now I don't think it is possible to replicate – no matter how many computers we have –- those visions of ineffable beauty that I, alone, have known and loved. And so I chose to focus on the connections between Jari's dream world and the so-called real world of his family relations to express his spirituality. What I personally know of mystical experience has been revealed in those shimmering revelations of unity, where the world of dreams and the everyday mundane world overlap, intermingle and exchange information, constantly; mysticism as direct experience of the oneness of life.
One final note. In working with these cinematic conventions to convey shamanic states, a question of discernment arises. What is the difference between a genuine mystical vision and an outright hallucination? To what extent is Jari (and for that matter, Antero Alli) deluded and/or even a bit enlightened? What distinguishes the real from the symbolic? These are big questions of perception and are, as such, relative to the point of view of whoever asks and moreso, whoever dares to answer.
As for me, I have no absolute answers for anyone but only heartfelt encouragement for people to keep asking these questions for themselves. I believe they matter in this hyper-mediated UnWorld of ours. I can and will, however, do my best to keep raising them in the films I make. And who knows? Maybe I'll even find an answer or two along the way...
Antero Alli lives in Berkeley, California and can be contacted by e-mail at: anteros@speakeasy.net. For information about his films, visit his website at: www.verticalpool.com