Independently-financed Finnish film gets cinema distribution

Miika Ullakko’s What Became of Us gets boost at foreign festivals

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By Harri Römpötti
     
      Finnish films that get shown in cinemas are usually produced with financial help from the Finnish Film Foundation. Miika Ullakko and his partners produced What Became of Us completely on their own.
      “One evening when I was eight years old I was bored. My mother suggested that I make my own movie with my father’s new camera”, Ullakko recalls.
      Now 22, Ullakko has been filming ever since. He also wrote the script for the new film and plays the male lead role.
      What Became of Us tells about a group of young people attending a reunion of their primary school class. The slightly goofy Jake (Ullakko) lives together with Erika (Marja Uusikylä), with whom he has a platonic relationship. They wait for their friend Toni (Olli Similä), who is getting out of prison. Also joining them is Pelle (Jere Laukkanen), who has escaped from a mental hospital in a wheelchair. Pelle was the victim of school bullying when he was a child.
     
“Money is not the biggest problem in making a film. You just need a few inspired people, and then it will start rolling like a snowbalĺ”, Ullakko says.
      The group who made the film are very young. The youngest, assistant director Iiris Juutilainen was just 14 years old when she joined the project.
      Naturally, money is also needed, but Ullakko says that it has not even been counted.
      “When my first full-length feature Graffiti Within was given an award in Denmark, we thought that we would get money from the foundation or somewhere, but we didn’t. So we just had to go out and do it. We spent a few thousand euros.”
      “What was most difficult was combining the shooting and other parts of our lives. I study architecture, and shoot videos, which paid for this. There were about 100 days of shooting in the period of a year. It would have been nice to be able to pay the people, but I wouldn’t do anything else any differently.”
     
Surprisingly, the ready film was accepted into the Shanghai Film Festival. We needed to dig up another EUR 13,000 to make a copy of the film.
      Since then, What Became of Us has been shown at events, including the Love and Anarchy festival in Helsinki, and it has received awards at a couple of small festivals in France and South Africa.
     
Some self-financed films are produced in Finland. For instance, the Star Wreck parody has become a hit on the Internet. What is exceptional in the project by Ullakko and his group is that it is getting a chance at a real cinema - albeit with only one copy.
      The group has modest ambitions: “More than 10,000 viewers would be really great, but I suspect that the figure will end up being a few thousand.”
     
As a film, What Became of Us is a relatively intelligent drama, which has some elements of a crime adventure. Unlike many hobby projects by film enthusiasts, it is neither a horror, action, or a camp film. Ullakko managed to become interested in making films before watching them.
      “I still don’t watch many movies. I like the kind that have many characters. In this, the class reunion is a convenient means for bringing different stories into one.”
     
Ullakko says that models for his film would include Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson and especially Paul Haggis’s Crash.
      Another role model for Ullakko is Peter Jackson - a director who started with horror movies filmed on a shoestring, such as Bad Taste, and ended up making colossal productions such as the Lord of the Rings films.
      “However, I am not interested in going anywhere from Finland. I don’t understand why I should produce films in English.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.12.2009


Links:
  Internet Movie Database: What Became of Us

HARRI RÖMPÖTTI / Helsingin Sanomat