The Story of Mikko Niskanen

Director-actor Mikko Niskanen was probably his generation’s greatest auteur, as well as its most troubled – in his career, success and failure almost always came in pairs, and sometimes proved indistinguishable. Between the early 1960s, when he directed his brilliant debut feature Pojat (1962), and the late 1980s, when he concluded his œuvre with a mind-boggling diptych, Elämän vonkamies (1986) and Nuoruuteni savotat (1988), while reaching a zenith in 1972 with the greatest Finnish film ever, Kahdeksan surmanluotia, Niskanen was as much a chronicler of his life and times as the AV-poet laureat/poète maudit of his nation. In a lot of ways, The Story of Mikko Niskanen is a companion piece to Man in the Shadows (1994). If the earlier work describes a man trying to be everything and nothing at the same time, then this piece reconstructs the soul’s painful attempt at becoming a unified whole. A stunning, moving and often painful paean to a life not lived to the full.