Documentary

Kustavi

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François Hien

During the summer in Kustavi, a little Finnish village, the sun never sets. Riikka invited me to the place she was raised. She wants to make her father and brothers talk, or rather for me to film their mutism. She went there to confront the silence that she had fled some years earlier. Little by little, between the two of us, a third character appears: a thief.

My mother always wrote in secret. At fifty years old, she breaks the long silence and publishes her first book. We go back to the origin of her speech, forty years earlier. What did she lose by coming out of the silence ?

Kustavi is a "documentary-novel" whose voice over, written in Alexandrians, transforms it into an investigation. We discover the dispossession once it has already taken everything away. Three existential quests - Riikka's, my mother's and mine - come together little by little. What happened in Kustavi ?

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