10/02/2025 - The storied director talks about her approach to managing the sacred, solitude and silence in her newest feature, a pensive character-driven tale about two women connected in unexpected ways

(© IFFR/V Cornel)

Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo returns triumphantly to the feature-film space with her newest work, Orenda [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pirjo Honkasalo
film profile], more than ten years after the release of Concrete Night [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Orenda, which world-premiered in IFFR's Big Screen Competition, tells the tale of two women whose worlds of grief and guilt begin to intertwine when they meet on a remote Finnish island. Cineuropa sat down with Honkasalo to discuss her unique gaze upon the sacred, solitude and silence – in the film and in life.

Cineuropa: The institution of religion and a more freeform kind of spirituality are both present and intertwined in Orenda. How do you conceive of them in your film and in your life?
Pirjo Honkasalo: I think that we as humans can never get rid of the sense of the sacred that's in all of us. If you deny it, that really is a belief. We don't know if it exists, but we have that kind of sense. Religions which are built on it have created an enormous amount of structures and rules: how we should sense and how we should live. When you go deeper, which is part of every religion – you could say the non-corrupted part of religions – actually, all religions are the same. They come back to the sense of silence inside us. I would say that what's most important in filmmaking and why filmmaking has caught me is not that it’s able to tell stories. I always feel that my films have stories, but they are born when making the film – they are never the purpose of making the film. I’m interested in the ability of film to describe and show what we’re going to talk about. If I could say, the “animal silence” in man is the part of human beings where we are all united. We are all the same.

Can you elaborate on this sense of silence – why is it important to you in filmmaking?
I remember reading, I think it’s the last interview of Ingmar Bergman, when they asked him, “You have done so many films and you are so old – does it get easier?” And he answered, “It never gets easier.” I'm happy if I manage, in a film, to express one moment which is true. I understand what he was talking about. The challenge is to somehow – even though there is talking and discussing – catch the silence of man and show it. When you look at the audience, when you have hundreds of people there, as a director, you want to reach from your solitude to each of these people in the audience separately, because all of their solitude is different. It's film which is born out of the connection between the two.

You direct the film from a script by your partner, Pirkko Saisio, who also stars in the film. How did your collaboration play out for this film in particular?
I don’t want to interfere too much in the scriptwriting. I think that the writer has to write along to get the best out of her or him, and then I’m the dictator when we are shooting. But all this has the consequence that the director and writer share approximately the same world, that they ask the same questions of being a human being. That way, you don’t discuss every detail that rocks the writer's mind. It’s still a common adventure with the writer. It’s kind of a miracle that so many people managed to get together in this film. In this film, particularly, the crew was very lovely. I don’t think I have ever aughed so much while shooting a film.

I’m glad to hear that it was such a joyous shoot – even as the script and material are quite intense and solemn. Can you elaborate on the production experience?
The conditions were very hard. I’ve also never been freezing so much as for this film. But the crew was fantastic, from two countries. it was a really big achievement, because when you have a crew from two countries, then something goes wrong – they say that this was the other people’s [fault]! Here, we didn’t have any of that, it was very united. It’s not a comedy, but maybe that good feeling, you can sense it somehow in the film.

You shot the film largely on the island of Jurmo. Why was this isolated locale important to you?
I think the island is, in a way, the main character of the film where everything they talk about is related to existing – and existing is not limited to man. There’s actually no limit to what we talk about regarding what human beings are. We are together with the rest of creation. It’s natural that [the island] is part of it all the time, because it affects how they sense life, how we sense life, how I sense life.