A rock gets trapped in a crevice of the bedrock. Rocked back and forth by the melting streams of the retreating glacier it starts drilling a pothole. Given enough time and water these potholes can turn into huge chambers. There are lots of these relics of ice age all over Scandinavia.

Descending into this kind of sacred opening in the bedrock feels like entering the womb of Earth. Thus, what began as a trapped motion has become an opportunity for birth. For us, that felt like the perfect metaphor for the film.

You can’t have experience of anything before you have done it. Although we didn’t have much experience on filmmaking per se we both did have 40+ years of experience as human beings. Not to discredit experts in any way, the fields of expertise – no matter what they are – are far less disjoint than they are often portrayed. All human activities are intertwined and feed to one another. And thus, with time, it also becomes easier to learn new skills.

It also helps if you are like Markku, who gets excited about everything. You need to be motivated to learn new stuff. And we had to learn everything along the way, whether it was lighting the scenes, building the sets, organizing the wardrobe, doing foley or CGI. It took six years to learn all that. In the end we didn’t become experts in anything, but we learned just enough to pull this through.

With no background in the film industry (or in any form of visual arts for that matter) and with a project as unordinary as this it would have been very difficult to convince people of what we were trying to achieve, not to mention the level of finesse we knew the undertaking would require. It is possible to attract people who share a similar position of no experience and skills, but we felt that if you can’t afford to hire a professional then it’s just much easier to do the same thing by yourself.

Besides, unless you really have the experience-laden authority it is hard to convince a group of experts to try something new and operate from the state of not-knowing, which in our case would have been interpreted as just the lack of experience. Sure, it was that too, but most importantly that was our method.

Having said that, we did have some very fruitful and enjoyable relatioships with industry professionals, most importantly with Paula-Leena Jokitie, who had strong faith in us from the beginning and did the costumes for us.

Each one of us has much deeper understanding of any situation than we are capable of verbalizing. Take the simple act of riding a bicycle. We don’t know how we do it, yet it comes effortlessly. As a matter of fact, if we were to put our understanding into words and then intellectually follow that we’d fall over in no time.

That’s why it’s troublesome to develop a film based on a succinctly formulated high concept, to proceed by deriving all aspects of the film so that they serve this concept. That would be like trying to learn to ride a bicycle by following instructions. What you need to do is to get on the bike, feel the bike, feel your response, and let yourself learn. Similarly, by letting go of our ideas we learned what our film really was about, or at least how we should proceed. We may not have been able to rationalize it, but somehow we knew.

Oftentimes there is no need to be able to explain what you are doing and why. Quite the opposite. Putting the newborn understanding into words could just curtail your point of view. You know far more by paying attention to the tensions, energies, and affordances of the situtation, by following the seemingly irrelevant imagery that pops in your head. You know in your heart and gut, in your genitals, in the muscles of your body. You know, and everyone else paying enough attention knows too. The others may expand upon what you see, or they may contradict you, in which case you need to sense the situation more carefully. That’s the process.

We weren’t quite sure when we embarked on the journey. There are many interpretations we came up along the way. Luckily we didn’t got stuck to any of them as that would’ve prevented us in delivering the thing that needed to emerge. In the end the choices we had to make, even some of the mistakes, make sense to us. It’s quite remarkable really. Maybe it’s the mind’s ability to tell stories where there ain’t any, or maybe it really is something unconscious that seeked a way out and casts a well defined shadow now that it’s out in the open.

So what is the film about? That may very well be the point of the whole film. Like a murder mystery is about finding out who did it. And there might be a correct answer too. But we’re not so sure if the answer is something that can be uttered aloud. And even if it was, the answer would curtail your unique point of view in a way that’d stole something very relevant from your experience. As it says in the beginning of the film: That which is uttered aloud has intentionally been left untranslated.

We felt that for most of the time there was no need, but also that when there is so much silence then every spoken word would get way too much emphasis. So it was the situation of all or nothing. Even a tiny bit of dialogue would have shifted the focus from what is shown to what is said. We didn’t want to do that.

In some scenes you can overhear some people talking or screaming in the background, but again we didn’t want to emphasize what is being said, only the manner it’s carried out. We had to develop a fictional language for that so that the words would be equally incomprehensible to everyone.

We also wanted to build an atmosphere of being lost in a world that appears both intimidating and incomprehensible, but where everyone else seems to know what they are doing, a viewpoint of an insecure child lost in the adults’ world.

As with all art you do it not because there is a market you have in mind but because there is something in the dark that seeks form, and you, as an artist, are chosen by the forces far greater than you can handle to carry out the miserable task of pulling it out from its hiding place. You’re lucky if you succeed and what has come out is something that others too can relate to. If so, you have your audience.

But the director of the film also did have a more specific audience in mind. Whenever he lost his faith during the process he reminded himself that he’s creating this thing for his muse, his partner life and art, Mari Käki. That was one of the very specific mental antidotes to despair we developed to pull through the years.

In addition to being the writer and director of the film Markku was also the hands-on guy that had to learn pretty much all the trades required to make a film. However, what Markku was particularly bad at that time was juggling his mental energies. At times there would be limitless inspiration making everything seem possible but it would be soon followed by either anxiety or lethargy. Because of this it was hard for him to trust his own judgement. That’s where Mari provided stability. Sharing the same vision she saw when we had strayed off course or when we had struck on gold. By profession Mari understands the creative process and was able to direct the director, gently pushing and pulling towards the vision, even at times when we both navigated in the dark. She was the stable bedrock of the project.

We both realized that early on and that’s why we made it explicit in the beginning: Mari was always to have the final word. That was the secure leash for an artist all too easily to be hijacked by a sudden breeze of emotion.

That’s the way we operated duo, with the distinct roles yet a shared vision. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any generally understood labels for these roles so it was difficult to figure out what to put in the credits. We considered ditching the standard form of credits altogether too but in the end decided to be conventional in this regard.

We planned the whole project for it. The camera would always be fixed and we did only one shot a day so we could setup everything beforehand. We typically had a month in between each shot so that left us with just enough time to scout, experiment, build and setup. Of course we often had to rent the studio for that whole time, but it was was still better than managing two dozen people rushing for things to happen on the shooting day.

The upside was the amount of calm and concentration on the set. It was such an amazing experience. Granted, we still had to wear too many hats. Having to divide the attention to so many things made the days exhausting and prone to mistakes. More trained eyes on the set would have helped to focus on directing instead of worrying about the lights, running around for the hazer, or clean up the set for a retake. A lot of retouching was done in the post too, as well as all the sound.

Because we didn’t hire a lot of people the biggest expenses are attributed to things like equipment, renting the studio space, accomodation, catering, licenses, materials for building the sets, and so on. That does add up, but the most important expense are the years spent on this with no pay.

A film like this created the way we did it would cost about a half a million. That is dirt cheap for a film, but for a piece of art that is hell of a lot. But we never gave much thought about getting compensated. We just knew we needed to do this. Life is way too confined if we were to be rational about it. By the way, that’s also one of the undercurrents of film, the imprisonment by reason. It may beat the imprisonment by clergy, but in the end its just another layer of self-deceit.

We showed a draft cut of the film to a group of random people aged 30 and up. Half of the audience was either interested in culture or somehow related to the cultural industry. We did some changes to the film based on the feedback, but most importantly we found out that despite the slow pacing the film was able to capture and maintain the interest and imagination of the vast majority of viewers. Half of the audience was either touched personally or would recommend the film to their friends. And perhaps most surprisingly of all, hardly no-one complained about the lack of dialogue.

Based on this we became confident there is an audience. But who is it? It’s hard to draw any generalizations, but if you feel the pictures of the film speak to you then its likely that it’s you.

You go and witness these pictures, listen to their story and embody their mystery, like you watched them in a gallery. You learn something about the authors, yourself and the state of humanity. Maybe it makes you feel emotional, elevated and composed, maybe there’s sadness, confusion or distress, or your thoughts run wild and don’t leave you at rest. Any of this could happen (according to our study). And as with all life if you watch it close and far enough there’s comedy too.

Without doubt that would be your own mind. Being an artist is a tough job. To venture into the unknown, out of your own comfort zone, to keep constantly on the edge. There will be serpents and sirens, the hybris and the loss of faith. Even more so if you need to stay committed for years and years to a project in the field you have no experience of, and you have nothing to show until its done. Before you’ve done something to prove yourself you are absolute nobody. You are nobody in the eyes of others but most importantly you are nobody in your own eyes too. It’s very hard to convince yourself that you are not just wasting your life. And indeed, it could very well turn out either way. Without Mari’s expertise of creative process thoughts like this would’ve easily sinked the ship.

But now that it’s over, regardless of film’s reception we feel proud of it. That is quite remarkable actually. Having watched the same images over and over at least thousand times one would assume to be completely fed up and burnt out. So it’s quite a blessing to be able to still enjoy the film. It turned out way better we could have imagined and can’t even ourselves quite understand how we were able to do that.

That is the part that depends on how the film is received. We didn’t have funding for Giant’s Kettle and did everything ourselves. That’s a very consuming way of doing things and although we’re glad we did it we’re not going to do that again. But if there is enough resonance for the kind of thing we do then there’s a real chance we can keep doing this. We’ll find out.

Also, we don’t want to create the second film just because that’s the thing we’re supposed to. There needs to be a burning need, a calling of an unborn that yet again needs to be pulled to the light of day. That’d be when the duty calls. But for now, who knows. There’s a lot we have learned and maybe there are people who could benefit from that. Markku dreams of taking on simpler tasks for now and Mari continues to teach and coach sharing her vision of meaningful, productive and compassionate collaboration.