Finnish filmmaker Hanna Nordenswan is making her documentary debut with “Sense and Sensibility”, which tells the story of the unique relationship between a mother and a girl who work both in a cemetery. The project won the Best Documentary Prize for Finnish Film Affair, which took place on September 24 to 26.
Produced by Zone2 Pictures based in Helsinki, “Sense and Sensibility” follows an alcoholic in convalescence which relies on his mother to obtain support. Their relationship has become symbiotic, and their lives have embarked on the cemetery where the two live in employee housing.
The two women, however, are polar opposites. While Carita’s personality is full of emotion, her daughter, Christa, depends on logic and rationality. Since she became sober, she refuses to let people enter. Instead, his life revolves around the cemetery, his mother and her rescue dogs.
But over time, Carita’s retirement begins to loom, and a heart attack – coupled with the growing exhaustion of Christa of the requirements of her work – changes their relationship with each other and towards the future. Faced with a new uncertainty, Christa must decide if she is ready to leave the security of the cemetery and to face the world beyond its doors-and, perhaps more importantly, to leave this world inside.
Talk to Variety In Helsinki, Nordenswan remembers meeting an article on the original mom-daughter duo at the end of the 2010s, when a Finnish newspaper profiled women and their unconventional family arrangement. “I had just kept it open like a tab on my computer for two years,” said the director.
A accomplished journalist who had directed a handful of documentary shorts, Nordenswan left Helsinki to attend a master’s program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, returning to Finland just before the triggering of the Coronavirus pandemic. Like many others at that time, she said, she found herself concerned about thoughts of death.
This, in turn, brought him back to Christa and Carita, who spent their professional life in incineration, comforting people in mourning and digging tasks that they have manipulated with grace and humor. Nordenswan wondered if “maybe they [would] Being able to make me more comfortable with the idea of death. »»
Once approached by the director, women were hardly thin of camera. “They were like:” Well, we thought it would be a good reality show. Everything that is going on here is so crazy, and people should know “,” said Nordenswan. “I think they also admitted that their relationship is quite special.”
Nordenswan began to film in 2022, and “very quickly, I realized that they had this super unique relationship,” she said. “They are very funny characters. The part of death has become the background, more than the subject [of the film]. “”
“Sense and Sensibility” seduced the Jury of Finnish Film Affair, which praised its “clear vision” and “a deeply human but extraordinary theme” while presenting the story of a mother and a girl “who is very relatable and which could resonate through borders”. The jury added that the film “promises to portray death as a natural part of life, taking advantage of a comic tone to parts and strong stylistic choices of the director.”
Although Nordenswan initially decided to give “meaning and sensitivity” as a means of conquering his fears about death, the cinema production process has not entirely given the results it hoped. However, she said it was a gratifying journey anyway.
“Working on this film did not really make me feel less frightened by death as I hoped, even if many of the processes around it feel less frightening now,” she said. “But that affected the way I think of my relationship with my mother. I think I learned something about making the best of your mother or daughter, how the protagonists of this film do it. ”
