First published between 1968 and 1973, before being adapted for Finnish television in 1976, the five novels in the Stormskerry Maja series, written by Anni Blomqvist, are a cornerstone of the literature of Finland and Sweden. “But no one in Finland has actually read them,” says filmmaker Tiina Lymi, with a hint of self-deprecation.
In fact, she hadn’t read the books when she first got pitched the possibility of adapting them for the big screen. She then went through all 1,300 pages of them, and eventually decided to turn them into her fifth feature film. It was released in Finnish cinemas on January 19, exactly one week before its international premiere in Rotterdam’s Limelight strand (the movie is also going to play at the Gothenburg Film Festival at the end of the month).
Set in the mid-to-late 1800s, the books deal with Maja and the hardships she endures on the island of Stormskerry, which is part of the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea. Situated between Finland and Sweden, it is an autonomous region of the former, but entirely Swedish-speaking. The plot is generally reflected in the film, but the powerful emotional core – the love between Maja and her husband Janne – came from the director. “I’m not sure whether to say it’s inspired by or based on the books. There’s a thin line.”
The big issue in bringing the story to the screen was language. Lymi originally wrote the script in her native Finnish, and then had it translated into Swedish, with additional tweaks from a dialect consultant since Åland Swedish is somewhere in between Finland-Swedish and the standard variety (what Finns refer to as rikssvenska). The dialect also required some acclimating from the actors, according to Lymi: the two leads, Amanda Jansson and Linus Troedsson, who hail from Sweden, spent a year mastering it. For the two-country supporting cast, it took six months.
Although she does speak Swedish, Lymi is not fluent (during our post-screening chat she uses Finnish and English to fill in the gaps when she struggles with a word). On set the filmmaker, who is also an award-winning actress, received vital support from Tobias Zilliacus, who plays Maja’s father, when communicating with the child actors: they’re Åland natives and speak no Finnish. Amusingly, considering this is a story that is largely about family, Zilliacus has a personal connection to the material: his great-uncle Benedict, a famed journalist and author, wrote the script for the 1976 TV miniseries.
Part of the plot revolves around the British army occupying the archipelago during the Åland War, and Lymi also had to switch from Swedish to English when directing actors from the UK. Occasionally, she got carried away and forgot: “I was directing Desmond Eastwood, who plays the officer Wilson, and the crew had to tell me to change the language. I apologized to Desmond, who said he didn’t want to interrupt me. He was so gentlemanly and English about it.”
Shooting on location in Åland was not without its challenges (although the “weather gods”, a concept that is also evoked in the movie, were largely on the crew’s side), especially with a reduced filming schedule (60 days became 50, then 47). But the result – the most ambitious of its kind – was a veritable epic for Finland-Swedish audiences.
“That’s funny, because it didn’t occur to me during production,” Lymi clarifies. “I think about myself, my personal connection to the material, when I’m filming. Now that we’ve released it, I see its importance to the Swedish-speaking crowd.” She adds a funny piece of backstory: “Someone did suggest I should make the film in Finnish, but that made no sense to me at all. They don’t speak Finnish on the Åland islands, so I would have had to make up a dialect. No way.”
