Seafarers – A Tale of a Young Sailor

The protagonist of this documentary, that takes the audience from underneath the blazing sun to the middle of icebergs and through the seven seas, is Jalmar “Jallu” Yrjänen. He is a young seaman from Rauma, Finland, whose fate was to be swallowed by the waves of the Atlantic Ocean as the only fatality of the shipwreck of his vessel, the M/S Mercur, on 8 December, 1925.

Milja Viita’s collage film combines primary source material such as letters and logbooks with archival film footage shot between the 1960s and the 1990s. The authentic footage lets us have a glimpse into the day-to-day life of seafarers far from their home ports. Viita, who won the Risto Jarva Award for her film Animal Bridge U-3033 at Tampere Film Festival in 2019, spent the years 2022-2023 collecting material for this new film as part of a project organised by the Lönnström Art Museum in Rauma.

Seafarers is a fascinating but tragic film. It portrays the seafaring life as it is: simultaneously adventurous and full of new experiences but also dangerous. Old material also brings out the dismal world of colonialism, for example when Jallu describes how he met a woman whose grandmother had arrived in South America as a slave.

Joonatan Nikkinen (translated by Herman Tikkanen)

Director Milja Viita will attend the screening on 6 and 8 February.