11/03/2025 - Iiris Härmä’s gentle portrait of a woman who’s lived a full life – and knows it – is overstretched to accommodate too many themes

A woman looks back on her life. Her story starts in a familiar enough manner, as she recalls a headstrong girl, born in the 1930s, who never, ever wanted to be married. Before she knew it, she was just that: a wife, then a mother. Not exactly what she was striving for, but that’s what was supposed to happen. The first cracks started to show rather quickly, followed by tragedy and disappointments. And by adventures. So many adventures.

In her documentary Mother of Snow Cranes – given the Special Award for films over 30 minutes long at the Tampere Film Festival – Iiris Härmä patiently listens to her protagonist, born to Finnish immigrants in Canada, whose marriage led her all the way to Iran. Ellen Vuosalo doesn’t mince her words any more. She mentions being treated as a man’s “property” and living a life where a husband “requires, but never thanks”. There’s no place for nostalgia here – instead, she recalls humiliation as he would leave money for the household “after a good night”. But there’s no place for regrets either, at least not too many.

“What a life,” she sighs at one point, and it’s a moment that feels deliciously smug. To feel proud of your life, to be entertained when recalling it – now that’s a sensation worth chasing. Vuosalo is, to put it simply, ready for her spotlight. She jumps from stories of brief romances to personal achievements, from family to Iran, which she clearly still loves. A tale of one woman’s empowerment morphs into a tale about a country – after all, she saw the 1970s revolution up close, at first being naïve about what was going on, and then disillusioned. As her life was opening up, other people saw theirs rapidly closing. Now, she’s at it again, watching women chanting, “Women, Life, Freedom,” commenting that “another revolution is happening”. Hers is complete.

Somewhere in the middle of it all is also her fight to protect Siberian snow cranes in Iran, which makes one think that these days, documentaries aren’t allowed to be just about one thing. Themes battle for attention, and it’s a tricky approach: sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Not every storyline is given a chance to properly spread its wings.

While Mother of Snow Cranes works, for the most part, as a gentle portrait of someone who came to the conclusion that “we are very small but connected to something very big”, it feels too polite. It only touches upon what happened in Iran and frequently loses focus, plus it suffers from the kind of excruciating, never-ending voiceover that explains too much and screams “made for TV” – or should that be “made for streaming”. Its protagonist might have been a bit of a rebel, but this is a safe film.

Mother of Snow Cranes was produced by Finland’s Guerilla Films and is sold overseas by Stranger Films Sales.