KINO OLYMPIA / NORTHERN PASSION

“I consider myself completely heterosexual, until I found myself in a situation that I don't even understand.”

A northern potato farming couple learns the rules of a new relationship and a way of life as different sexual orientations and needs test the boundaries of love.

Short synopsis:

In the midst of a vast northern landscape, a potato farming couple learns the rules of a new relationship. Fifty-year-old Petri, having confronted his bisexuality, wants to fulfill his passions. Anu, in turn, is forced to question her expectations for a relationship.

Long synopsis:

The potato farming couple's new relationship is based on openness and honesty. Fifty-year-old Petri, having confronted his bisexuality, learns to be true to himself and honest with his partner. For Anu, Petri's desires to fulfill his own passions raise new questions about her own desires and demands in the relationship. Beneath the empty northern landscapes, a world of men is revealed, a world that has been kept secret from partners, the surrounding community, and partly even from themselves.

DIRECTOR'S NOTE

I wanted to make a documentary that would be sensual and sexually empathetic. I wanted to portray the sexuality of ordinary, family-oriented people in the North, in a society where it still evokes guilt and shame. This was also the starting point for the film's visual style, as we approached erotically charged, sensitive moments where people are at their most exposed and vulnerable. I hoped to reinterpret traditional melodramatic storytelling for the quiet present day of the northern remote areas, where few wish to draw attention to themselves within their community.

I had no need for any kind of provocation. A question gnawed at my mind: how could one live correctly in a loving relationship, yet also be true to oneself?

These four years have been an intense learning process for me regarding the secrets of human relationships. Through the documentary, I aimed to portray something invisible, almost unidentifiable in our time, but the men and couples who participated in the film at its various stages led me deeper into the fundamentals of love and sexual morality by sharing their lives in a land of deep frost.

The meeting of Petri and Anu was crucial for the development of the film. There was the right kind of chemistry between us. Their fundamental question concerned the state of love, faithfulness to oneself, and truthfulness to another in a new relationship where one of the partners also shows interest in their own gender. In collaboration, we were able to depict how Petri and Anu begin their lives in an open relationship on a potato farm?

Even today, the majority of men who are married to women but seek male companionship live 'in the closet' and completely conceal their sexuality, and their close circle or anyone else may not necessarily know about it. They can be unknown even to their partners and perhaps even to themselves. Men who have sex with men do not necessarily even question their heterosexuality. But as our film shows, there can also be men very close to us who are looking for a way out of a world of secrets. Only in the eyes of others can there be space to grow to our full potential as human beings.

But is it possible to think differently about sexuality and love in traditional heterosexual relationships when authoritarian conservative circles attack the human and civil rights of minorities on both sides of the Atlantic and here at home in Europe?