Fable meets forest in the newest film by acclaimed Finnish documentarian Virpi Suutari, Once Upon a Time in a Forest [+lee también:
entrevista: Virpi Suutari
ficha de la película], capturing the country's larger anti-deforestation movement through the eyes of its young proponents, as well as the sublime beauty and importance of the nature they’re trying so hard to preserve. Having premiered earlier this year at CPH:DOX, the Finnish production by the three-time Jussi Award winner is now vying for a prize in DOK Leipzig’s Audience Competition.

As the film follows a group of passionate young environmental activists (among them Ida Korhonen, Minka Virtanen and Otto Snellman), we learn that the group is part of Extinction Rebellion Finland via a smaller forest-focused organisation taking direct action to protect old-growth forests in Lapland. Suutari homes in on Ida, a fast-talking but deeply knowledgeable and outspoken 22-year-old activist, as our lens through which to see this world. We witness both the personal — in a few scenes, we how her father vehemently disagrees with what she does — as well as the collective — her perspective amongst the forest movement group.

Suutari strikes cinematic and emotional gold with Ida, who is a naturally captivating subject: she so thoroughly substantiates her arguments that her passion is never unbelievable or performative, despite being such a young activist. An encounter between the young woman and loggers at night results in her assertively telling the log harvesting driver that he can “have a day off, or two” — and he agrees. With the machine towering over her protagonist, the director evokes symbolic imagery of “Tank Man” during the Tiananmen Square protests, or the image of late Palestinian boy Faris Odeh throwing a stone at an Israeli tank during the Second Intifada. The difference in size indirectly references the David and Goliath battle the activists face, connecting it to countless other similarly sized-up struggles worldwide.

We follow these young people further through their rallies in Helsinki, in protests against logging (including one shocking image of police dragging the activists away from a makeshift campsite) and lobbying meetings with politicians. The viewer also gains access to meetings between the activists and those supporting corporate logging, which highlight the strong rational behind pro-environmental arguments in a way that never becomes manipulative. At the same time, the encounters between the group and the police emphasise the emotional side of their case. Portraying level conversations between the activists and the state has the effect of skewing the public narrative that well-known groups like Extinction Rebellion and other climate activists simply intend to cause chaos through eye-catching but pointless actions.

These moments, in particular, are what really help the film succeed, as Suutari is able to show the group’s objective-based disobedience-without-violence work and the outcomes they’re trying to achieve through sheer reasoning. But we’re also privy to the more familiar daily lives of the activists, their group meetings and moments of downtime where they party, cycle or swim — shot with a beautiful, sweeping eye by cinematographers Teemu Liakka and Jani Kumpulainen – because they’re still young adults, after all. As alluded to in the film’s title, Suutari occasionally creeps into fairytale territory in the imagery of Lapland, but it feels warm and lush, never inauthentic or tacky.

Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a Finnish production by Suutari’s Helsinki-based outfit Euphoria Film. Autlook Films are managing world sales.