Markku was Karin Pennanen’s favourite uncle when she was a child. He played with her, did magic tricks and taught her to love art. But when Karin was eleven years old, Markku disappeared behind a door which wouldn’t be re-opened for another thirty-four years.

When her uncle died in 2021, Karin entered into his home for the first time since her childhood and discovered a hidden world: thousands of paintings, collages, musical compositions, video cassettes, audio diaries and notes on how to make films. Markku had studied at the Sibelius Academy and at the Academy of Fine Arts but he’d given up both courses. He spent his life delivering newspapers by night and creating art for his eyes only. A genius recluse who spent decades building up a monumental archive which was destined to disappear upon his death.

Days of Wonder is the Finnish director’s first feature film, which won her Best Documentary at the most recent Tallinn Black Nights Festival and was selected in Bergamo Film Meeting’s Close Up section. Pennanen approaches her material as a conversation partner rather than an archaeologist. Markku had recorded all of his phone calls and left reflections on films: what makes a character real, how to build a narrative. It’s as if he’d prepared the film others would end up making about him. His niece takes up the challenge and initiates a post-humous dialogue with him, which unfolds on various levels: verbal, when she responds directly to his recordings; visual, when she uses his works to comment on or to complete what he’d left unfinished; and conceptual, when she thinks about the meaning of artistic creation through her own filmmaking practices.

Markus Leppälä’s editing has the feel of a collage, the technique favoured by Markku who cut out images from the newspapers he delivered to create mosaics. Pennanen adopts this very same method: fragments of Super 8, VHS, digital video and archive footage overlap without any kind of chronological hierarchy. The result is a layered film which doesn’t try to explain Markku but to draw him out by following the tracks he left.

The aesthetic challenge in the task is clear: making public something that her uncle wanted to keep private. Markku had designed enormous windows in his house-workshop so that he could remove the large-scale paintings from his house. Maybe he envisaged exhibiting them? But this was something he never did. His niece decides to do this for him, knowing that her decision could be interpreted as an act of love or a betrayal. The film wavers between the two readings without offering resolution.

The scene involving the medium, a didactic device in a film which otherwise avoids easy fixes, is a little disappointing, but Ville Katajala’s sound work, which conveys the density of Markku’s inner world through his compositions and voice recordings, is undeniably interesting. Actor Martti Suosalo reads the final email that Markku didn’t manage to send, a heartbreaking text which turns the blank canvass – a recurring feature in the film – into the confine between life and death, and a crossing point where the uncle and his niece can come together again.

Days of Wonder asks questions about the price of artistic freedom: Markku lived on the margins, but was he free or was he a prisoner of his own solitude? The director suspends judgement, instead affectionately observing a man who chose to create without expecting recognition, at a time when art’s value is measured on its visibility. Rather than physical, the film is a spiritual resurrection: it lends a voice to those who have chosen silence.

Days of Wonder was produced by Avanton Productions (Finland), in co-production with Good Company Pictures (Denmark) and Mechanix Film (Norway).