21/11/2024 - Klaus Häro relates a little-known episode in Finland’s World War II experience, where a business proprietor toiled to save the country’s small Jewish population

Here we are again in one of cinema’s favourite locations: the world stricken by World War II. Sound cinema was only a decade old as the war officially began: it would closely document the conflict occurring and spend the rest of its ongoing life looking back at it. Film distorts, but also amplifies, the war’s warning from history, and most frightening current events today have a correlative to it.

Finland was militarily allied to Germany for the war’s majority, but never fell under occupation (Denmark and Norway did, whilst Sweden was famously neutral). Yet it was an understandably tense time for the nation’s tiny Jewish community, abetted by recent refugees fleeing danger. Klaus Häro – an experienced hand with adroit, factually based films – tells their story well with Never Alone [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which world-premiered last week as the opener of Tallinn Black Nights’ Baltic Film Competition.

The movie is a handsomely appointed recreation of the past, but is overly wedded to how these stories have typically been dramatised in Hollywood flicks: as simple morality plays beholden to slickly manipulate the audience, with its lead “saviour” figure Abraham Stiller (played by Ville Virtanen) subliminally evoking Oskar Schindler. Yet Häro is still able to provide careful nuance, and Finland’s Holocaust experience is distinguished and isolated from neighbouring countries, with more finite parameters owing to various geopolitical factors; the events will return to the public consciousness thanks to this film, and the embattled position of migrants in Europe now has its echoes in the Jews’ unstable status as minorities in Finland’s homogenous society.

Part of an earlier wave of Jewish migration from Tsarist Russia, Stiller – who runs a successful textile business with his gentile wife Vera (Nina Hedström) – is portrayed as a conscientious, if sometimes naive and idealistic, figure, a community lynchpin (and interlocutor on its behalf to Helsinki’s powerbrokers) seeking to uplift new Jewish arrivals to Finland who are in more precarious conditions. A black-and-white-shot framing device beginning in 1972 sends his memory racing back, as a journalist (Satu Tuuli Karhu) interviewing him on reel-to-reel tape for a book inquires after the fate of a man called Kollman. Georg (Rony Herman) and his wife Janka Kollman (Naemi Latzer) – the latter employed by Stiller – were Austrian Jews who escaped their home in 1938; pro-Nazi factions in the Finnish government put the safety of these migrants under new threat, their lack of citizenship a pretext for them to be deported back to where they originated from, with this fact and its portent profoundly unsettling the country’s already assimilated Jews, who feared they might be next.

In a flurry of tense scenes, Häro relates every turn of the narrative with forceful aplomb; rather than making one story of survival a synecdoche for the Jews’ entire Holocaust trauma, Never Alone excels in asserting particularity and specificity, with individual struggles seen at eye level in a sober, respectful manner. Beyond the contemporary resonance, he and co-writer Jimmy Karlsson also display a sharp understanding of political cronyism and bureaucratic waste – another kind of systemic failure impeding our ongoing fight against fascism.

Never Alone is a co-production by Finland, Estonia, Austria, Germany and Sweden, staged by Matila Röhr Productions, Taska Film, Samsara Filmproduktion, Penned Pictures and Hobab. The Playmaker Munich handles its world sales.