When it comes to esports gaming, there aren’t many better in Finland than the precociously talented 17-year-old Verneri “Bona” Junkala. Bona has astonishing hand-eye coordination and hunger for battle. His flaw, though, is that he gets very nervous In important team tournaments, he always seems to blow it. That is why he is put together with a top psychologist.
Bona’s story is told in The Gamer, the new documentary from Finnish directors Petri Luukkainen and Jesse Jokinen premiering in the CPH’s Nordic:Dox competition.
“We go way back. We’ve know each other since school times,” Luukkainen says of his co-director. “We’ve partnered up on almost every project together.”
Jokinen’s initial career was as a cinematographer while Luukkainen has always specialised as a director. On this project, though, they shared the tasks.
The duo had already worked together on such projects as My Stuff (2013) and 2018 BBC series Just Boys, about five teenage boys with mental health issues who meet through online gaming and go inter-railing through Europe together. According to Luukkainen, his partner had “an interest in esports and especially the coaches.” Luukkainen had met sports psychologist Mia Stellberg on an earlier project and told Jesse about her. They had the idea of making a film about her work with Bona.
Jokinen’s sports background is as an ice hockey player. He remembers the strong support he received from teammates and parents. For gamers like Bona, it’s very different. “These guys are doing it alone most of the time. They are playing by themselves.”
In The Gamer, viewers get to see the sessions between the psychologist and the nervous young gamer. These are shot in very intimate fashion with close-ups of Bona’s face as he talks about his mental struggles. The filmmakers used several cameras and different angles.
“Our style is that we don’t try to be fly on the wall. The people we work with, they are very aware that we are there. We make noise…we are making a big thing that we are there with the protagonists, even if that doesn’t show in the film,” Luukkainen notes of how they set about shooting scenes like the ones between Mia and Bona. “We are not trying to be shy.” He and Jokinen like to stand in front of the camera, blocking their view, interacting with their protagonists. Not everybody is comfortable with their freewheeling approach but Bona had an instant rapport with them.
The Gamer is produced through Liisa Karpo’s and Marianne Mäkelä’s napafilms. “When we came to the scene with //.]
we were complete outsiders…we started to build our careers from scratch. We didn’t have the producer you had gone to school with,” Luukkainen says of his route into the business. He identified Karpo as a producer who would be “on the same track” as him and would understand his ideas, someone “slightly above me – but not too far ahead!”
When it came to The Gamer, it helped that Bona was such a compelling lead character. “You can always see the spark in there. You can really see how much the guy is giving for the sport,” Jokinen observes.
Sometimes, Bona would play throughout the night. His passion motivated the filmmakers to do their best too. “Before I pitched this project to Liisa, we had just met this character Bona,” Luukkainen remembers. They’d encountered him during their early research but knew instantly that he was just “so cinematic…his presence is something special.”
Bona is no extrovert. “He’s not like a person who would go in front of the camera unless it is completely mandatory,” Luukkainen said of him. Nonetheless, he had a natural charisma.
“We understood from previous projects that a young person’s face is very subtle. Emotions don’t really show because there are no wrinkles…we have to be very close. We felt this person’s aura was really strong.” What’s more, Bona doesn’t waste words. When he says something, he’ll have thought very hard about what he wants to express. That makes him yet more compelling on camera.
The film of The Gamer is just part of a much bigger protect.
“We had done a few days of shooting and we were sitting down with the production company. They said ‘who is this for?’ We’re not really big with this thinking like ‘it’s for everybody.’ We try to be very specific always,” Luukkainen observes. He and Jokinen realised the film had many different angles. It was about psychology, it was a coming of age story and it was a sports drama.
The filmmakers therefore suggested creating four different formats from the same story: the feature-length film, a web series, a YouTube series and an Instagram series. In each, the ingredients are more or less the same but the storytelling and the rhythm are different. The 90-minute feature is more for the arthouse cinema audience whereas the shorter formats are intended to appeal to younger viewers.
“The producers really loved the idea that we would have multiple target audiences and multiple projects to sell,” Luukkainen says of the many different sides to The Gamer. There were separate editors for the different segments too.
“We managed to do it. It was a schizophrenic direction in one single day. If we were going to do interviews, we’d be thinking, we’re going to do it directly to the camera and then we’re going to have this more point of view style for the younger audience, and then a bit more classical for a feature length documentary…it was like a creative trial!”
This week Canadian sales agent Syndicado took world sales right to the film.
