Documentary tale of tinned goods is now in the can

Film director Katja Gauriloff visited ten countries to meet people behind the making of just one food tin

Katja Gauriloff

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By Leena Virtanen
     
      Every food can of foreign origin that ends up in someone's shopping trolley in Finland has a long story to tell.
      One just does not necessarily come to ponder the narrative behind it.
      Documentary filmmaker Katja Gauriloff did start to think about this. She wanted to make a film of the story of a food can. The kind of can that one can buy from any old Finnish supermarket, even for less than a euro.
      Now her film Säilöttyjä unelmia (“Canned Dreams”) is finished, or in the can as they say. It took four years to complete.
      ”The first two years were spent developing ideas, organising funding, and performing background research", Gauriloff explains. ”Then it was time to set off.”
     
Not everything is revealed in advance - for example, what ultimately ends up in the can. Guessing this is partly what makes the film engrossing.
      In the end, Gauriloff wound up shooting footage in ten different countries, starting from Brazil, where a woman working in a mine takes part in quarrying the metal from which the can itself is ultimately manufactured.
      The film’s story is like a never-ending rhyme.
      The places that are visited along the way include, for example, a tomato farm in Portugal, a mill in the Ukraine, a pig farm in Denmark, and a slaughterhouse in Poland.
      And from these only some of the ingredients originate.
      ”For example the salt and all the additives were left out. To include the origin of the spices used I could even have travelled to India”, Gauriloff says.
     
Still, the film is not so much about the can of food itself as about the people who contribute to producing it.
      These are the workers behind the global economy, people that we would otherwise never meet.
      Gauriloff’s documentary gives them a voice to share their lives and dreams.
      “Of course this has been an absurdly ambitious project. We have even called it 'the mammoth'.”
     
The undertaking was also quite a reach considering that before embarking on it Gauriloff, 39, had completed only one one-hour documentary.
      A Shout into the Wind (2007) was a film about the Skolt Sami community and the maintaining of their traditions.
      That said, Gauriloff does have further experience of shorter documentaries as well as fictional projects.
      In the venture, Gauriloff was backed by the Oktober production company and producer Joonas Berghäll, who in turn is the director of the successful 2010 sauna documentary Miesten vuoro (“Steam of Life”).
      Canned Dreams has several foreign sponsors, such as Arte and - perhaps slightly surprisingly - Al Jazeera English.
      It is already established that the film will receive a theatrical release in Denmark.
      It was also recently chosen to compete in the "Culinary Cinema" series at the Berlin International Film Festival.
     
For Gauriloff, it was important that the film does not “underline” issues.
      No voice-over narration was used.
      The featured people were selected based on the director's intuition.
      “The initial meeting was crucial. I asked in my mind if there is trust between us and if this person has a story to tell.”
      There were plenty of stories, such as that of a Polish slaughterhouse worker who is depicted at his work and who speaks of his unfaithful wife and his children.
      Or that of a Ukrainian mill woman, a former Communist, for whom work and bread are everything.
     
The entire undertaking could have collapsed under its own impossibility. The company that manufactures the can refused all cooperation.
      ”First we contacted them as ordinary consumers and dialogue was established. We found out that the tomatoes originate from Portugal. But once the company realised that we were up to something, they abruptly pulled the plug.”
      After that an investigative assistant was found, about whom Gauriloff refuses to reveal anything.
      The secrets of the can began to unfold.
     
The documentary shows how piglets are transported from a Danish farm to a slaughterhouse in Romania, but in this point of the film there is a gap in the story.
      “The piglets are born in Denmark, but before they are slaughtered in Romania they are first raised in Germany”, Gauriloff reveals.
      The German pig farms were a no-go area, and the makers of the film did not want to include any secretly-filmed footage in it.
      “The German giant piggeries did not even allow us within conversation distance. Once we went to check out one pig farm from the outside. It was an insane facility, in the middle of a forest, surrounded by barbed wire. We heard the pigs screaming inside. Even that would have been enough for us, just the sound and the barbwire fence, but at that time we did not have a camera with us”, Gauriloff recalls.
      For a long time Gauriloff has been a vegetarian, but before the filming trip she decided to accept everything that would be offered up along the way.
     
The slaughterhouse gigs were tough, but the main cinematographer Heikki Färm was not phased by anything.
      “He never complained once about anything”, Gauriloff says admiringly.
      Färm’s camera has even managed to capture some beauty in the slaughterhouses.
      In a Romanian slaughterhouse, women use flamethrowers to burn hair off the pig carcasses, and suddenly the sight is almost devout.
      “Yes, they almost look like avenging angels standing there on the steps”, Gauriloff notes.
      The film's fundamental themes are happiness and dreams. They are common to people everywhere.
      While working on the documentary, the makers discovered a basic truth about the relationship between work and happiness.
      “The closer to primary production people work, the happier they are.”
     
     
Canned Dreams will be shown as part of the Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint in Helsinki’s Bio Rex cinema at 19:30 on Thursday. The theatrical release in selected cinemas will commence on January 27th.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.1.2012


Links:
  DocPoint
  YouTube: Canned Dreams (Säilöttyjä unelmia) trailer
  Canned Dreams on Facebook
  Finnish Film Foundation (For info about Canned Dreams, click on Films, then Documentaries)

LEENA VIRTANEN / Helsingin Sanomat
leenavirtan@gmail.com