A three-time winner of a Finnish Jussi (Academy Award equivalent), Virpi Suutari pitched her new film to the documentary professionals gathered in Finland for Finnish Film Affair.
Intimately following Ida, Minka and Otto throughout 18 months of forest surveying, secret strategy meetings and open conflicts, “Once Upon a Time in a Forest is both a generational film that reflects the environmental feelings of the youth, and a love story of a younger generation whose object of love is the Finnish forest,” the synopsis reads.
In Helsinki, Suutari was looking for sales representation and festival interest for the film, budgeted at €515,000 and currently in post-production.
“Finland is, relatively, the most forested country in whole of Europe, and yet 90% of our forests are in danger [of] loggings,” she explained at FFA. “At the centre of the film, we find two very exceptional young females, Minka and Ida, and group of their activist friends who definitely don’t want our old-growth forests to turn into pulp and toilet paper. Together they have started a new forest activist crossroad group called Forest Movement Forest Rebellion. We witness how Minka is still learning and discovering the wonders of forests, whereas 22-year-old Ida becomes a sort of leader and soul of this new movement and how, by the end of the film, she leads troops over a small mountain in Lapland in harsh conditions in order to protect those areas from loggings.”
It is a film of contrasts, Suutari underlined, cinematic while portraying the environmental tendencies of the youth, but all the time offering multiple exposures on the subject. “On one hand, we find these main characters in the forests and giving the viewer an enchanting and sensual forest experience. Minka, for example, diving with perches and Ida is communicating with Siberian jays. But the next moment we find the same characters in forest company headquarters talking to the big bosses or having a conversation with grandfather who used to be a forest worker. Those are very heartbreaking moments in the film and we really feel how the old and the new worlds collide and how change is on its way.”
Suutari spoke to Business Doc Europe at Cannes 2023 when she explained her approach to the craft of docmaking. “I am always interested in making films that are at the same time local but universal. I am interested in human behaviour and in this film I am aiming to express the environmental feelings, sorrows, anxieties and also glimmers of hope that we all share at this moment. The subject matter is urgent but I also want to look beyond, and make the film more timeless,” Suutari said.
“This is done with beautiful and precise cinematography, sound design and score…[and] luckily I have on the project one of the best nature cinematographers in Finland, Teemu Liakka, who has shot among others Ailo´s Journey (2018) and The Tale of the Sleeping Giant (2020).”
“I’m confident to say that Once Upon A Time In A Forest is truly a film about love and anarchy,” Suutari added in Helsinki, referencing the name of the festival that embraces Finnish Film Affair, “and it’s sort of a morality play where love for forests turns into beautiful action.”
