After his 2013 documentary feature Wolfman, Juha Suonpää returns to the theme of the ‘predator’ in his intriguing Lynx Man, about a man and his search for the elusive wild cat. In the film the elderly Hannu, whom Suonpää describes as an ‘urban shaman,’ opens a gateway into Finnish nature and the environment by placing trace cameras within the forest in order to capture rare footage of the lynxes, their movements and their interactions.
In his FFA pitch director Juha Suonpää said of Hannus: “A hundred years ago, the lynx became extinct in Finland. Six years ago, I met a man who told me he can talk with them. Six years later, after about a hundred film trips, I still haven’t seen any…but this guy has.”
While the first half of the film will build the sense of tension and excitement as we await Hannu’s first encounter with the lynx, “the second half of the film is about deepening dialogue between man and nature,” says Suonpää. Hannu is determined to see and reveal more, and the cameras begin to unveil the spectacular natural life within the forest, the world that Hannu inhabits.
“I’m not interested in the way that lynxes are shown to us on National Geographic. I’m interested in the emotional connection,” Suonpää says, eschewing the notion that the filmmaker’s role is in somehow about “saving” the predators. Rather he promotes a sense of “fellow travellership” between humans and other animal species. “The more we can learn from their behaviour on an emotional level, the more tools we may get in order to tackle [our own] challenges.”
The director widens his theme of empathy and understanding between human and beast. “Hannu is building his own connection to the lynxes,” Suonpää says of the shaman’s observation and engagement. “That is something that goes paradoxically to the origins of the Finnish mentality, how we came to be here in the north, how we survived here in the north. The only way was to listen those predators [who were] sometimes competing with us, but also we were able to learn from them.”
“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.”
Does the director fear a Grizzly Man scenario whereby the subject of his film is endangered by the animal he is observing? “They [the lynxes] are too clever to do harmful things to humans. They could, of course, but they don’t bother,” responds the director.
Suonpää returns to the subject of aesthetics, unsurprisingly from a filmmaker with a background in fine arts and photography. “I’m a visual artist and that gives me the new tools to show nature from new perspectives. I want to talk with a broad audience using a visual language close to [what] is used with mobile phone cameras. Everybody is shooting films, and I’m using trail cams [to film the lynxes], the ‘first cameras’ as I call them,” he says.
“What we see from 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 continues, adding how, for Hannu, the simple camera is “a beacon and a meeting place between man and other species.”
Produced by Pasi Hakkio and Niina Virtanen and supported by The Finnish Film Foundation, AVEK, YLE, Film Tampere, Estonian Film Institute and Estonian Cultural Endowment, the 75-minute film will be ready for delivery in 2023.
