Lynx Man is a delicious oddity of a film. Its main character Hannu may, to some folk, seem somewhat of an oddball, solitary and uncompromising within the arboreal wilds of Finland, and totally in love with the felines whose return to the forest he charts.
To others he is a heroic and passionate ranger who has dedicated his life to protecting nature and its non-human occupants.
Director Juha Suonpää is in the latter camp, although his cameras (whether trail cameras dotted around the forest or night cams which transform the objects of their gaze into ghoulish spectres) do little to deflect from the former impression.
“He is not ‘normal’ in the [usual] sense,” says Suonpää, further observing that our reliance upon what is deemed to be ‘normal’ has delivered us a less than perfect world. “We really need to reimagine our future,” he says, The “linear ways” have given us “the climate crisis. We have war, we have Covid (wherever it comes from). We have these ‘black swans’ around us.”
Hannu is no David Attenborough sent to reflect wisely on the animals in their habitat. He is an altogether different kind of beast. Nor indeed is Suonpää’s approach out of the National Geographic mould.
“What we see from the National Geographic-style of wildlife film is something [which] paradoxically keeps a distance, which keeps the objectified targeting going on, and this is something that I want to break,” Suonpää told BDE during Finnish Film Affair in September 2022, adding how, for Hannu, the forest camera is “a beacon and a meeting place between man and other species.”
Whereas National Geographic represents “the normative and traditional,” Hannu’s approach to nature “was totally based on his imagination,” Suonpää adds of his hero.
Hannu is a “fellow traveler” with the animals of the forest, and especially the elusive lynx which Suonpää, despite recording their movements with the remote forest cameras, has never actually seen in real time.
In the film we see the beasts and hear Hannu’s loving appraisal of them. His sense of identity with the cat is underlined by the feline masks he wears. He has even named them. The males are called Joseph and the ‘The Terror of Laitila’ and the females are Grumpy Girl, Button Nose and Spit. We also hear Hannu’s lament as disease weakens one of the males and as hunters enter the hallowed forest.
Furthermore, Hannu derives strength and enlightenment from his daily saunas in the forest. “It’s a place where transition happens, where the normal way of being is changed to another level,” says Suonpää. Saunas are a place “between culture and nature,” he adds, where shamanistic thinking can reach an “animalistic level.”
The forest footage is evocative as a range of curious animals, not just lynxes, approach the camera, their eyes blazing in the night vision. But the cats are the stars and Hannu idolizes them, noting how Joseph poses in the frame “like a film star.” To emphasise Hannu’s obsession with the lynxes Suonpää blends images of them with the smoke of the sauna, and dramatically projects footage onto the side of Hannu’s woodland cabin.
Does the director agree that an outlier like Hannu is as much in need of protection as the cats in his charge?
“In the countryside culture of Finland, every village has the crazy guy, the crazy one,” says Suonpää. These are folk whose questions and actions may seem simplistic on one level, but deep and profound on another, he says. As they question our relationship with nature, they help form a greater overall holistic connection between societal and urban life. Suonpää argues therefore that their removal into institutionalised health care would sever this vital connection, and a unique voice from the wilderness would be lost.
“This is what the film is about, how to [discard] rational thinking, and instead of that, to be able to build new ways of seeing, because this is the radical shift, and one we really have to take in order to make the change happen globally also,” Suonpää ends.
