The Dinosaur

What do you do when one of your nation’s greatest filmmakers is now widely remembered as a sociopath who tortured actors with his intemperate moods and drove crews nuts with his directorial excesses? This is the question Veikko Aaltonen explores apropos his mentor: Rauni Mollberg, Finland’s internationally best-known auteur of the 1970s and 1980s.

With grimly naturalist dramas like the bleak Lapland pastoral The Earth Is a Sinful Song (1973) or the savage war epic The Unknown Soldier (1985), Mollberg tapped into the collective subconscious of Finland like nobody ever had, producing masterpieces that explore unknown depths of human suffering Finns can eerily identify with. The Dinosaur might talk about only one director and one country, but the questions carefully asked and uneasily answered apply to all film culture everywhere – making it one of the most politically important works of recent years.