Eight Deadly Shots

Peter von Bagh was always joking that Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation should handle the restoration of this Zola-esque monument, as it was obviously made in a Third World country. And true, it’s difficult to imagine that the down-trodden, poverty-stricken, backwoods hole we see here is situated somewhere in 1960s Finland.
The real-life story on which Eight Deadly Shots is informally based happened in 1969. In a moment of sheer hopelessness, a certain Tauno Veikko Pasanen shoots four police officers. Tauno is called Pasi here and played by scenario-writer Niskanen himself. Pasi ekes out a meagre living for himself and his family. Times grow increasingly harder. One thing slowly leads to another. In the end, there’s blood. A raw, grim, uncompromising, unrelenting, unforgiving and non-consoling masterpiece which will be shown in its five-hour-plus original version. A very, very rare opportunity!