Adventure Starts Here

Jörn Donner’s third film, ADVENTURE STARTS HERE, clearly evinces the film-maker’s signature style and accents. Here fact and fiction meet, real life collides with film, and the viewpoint from which Donner unveils his vision. In what is certainly his most personal film, Donner views the city and people, their relationships with each other and the surrounding environment. Helsinki and Finnish society have an important role to play, but people are nevertheless central. As Anne says: “I am interested in people, not places.”

Anne and Toivo met in Berlin and had a fling; now they are trying to find themselves and each other in a constantly changing Helsinki. Their search and their relationship remain just that – a search without any manifestation of the erotic. Nothing intimate ever happens on screen, just a glass wall between them, expressionless faces and silence.

An emotional crisis, alienation, craving for contact and relationships that leads nowhere, the coming choice between solitude and togetherness, interdependence and freedom – Donner paints the contemporary problems that confront each of the main characters in cool yet lifelike and evocative colours.

Tarmo Malmberg (1966, 1970) and Sakari Toiviainen (1975)