Splinters – A Century of an Artistic Family

A family like a nation: Finland’s painful path to independence, its development from a poor rural backwater to a prime example of progress and liberalism as seen through three generations of the Aho family. Pater familias Juhani wrote Juha (1911), a luminary of Nordic literature; his wife, Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, was among Finland’s first female painters; his sons Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan became pioneers of Finnish documentary cinema; his grand-daughter Claire was among the country’s leading (fashion and ad-art) photographers of the 1950s and 1960s. An immensely moving study of Finnishness, its essence; a grand essay on time and memory, their limits and abysses; a paean to the arts as pillars of a nation’s self; a vigil for an era in human development. Seventy-four minutes like a lifetime.

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