CPH:DOX 2020 - Själö (Island of Souls)

CPH:DOX 2020

At first glance, the very first images captured in Själo - Island of Souls could be dismissed as just bugs; there are fireflies, grasshoppers, moths and other small things that, to be fair, are beautifully shot in night-time under neon colours and shallow focus. Hardly what would be expected to go into something that among other things, by the end,  becomes a dreamlike journey across the past and present of femininity in Finland.  It is a journey which, by dealing with personal experience, collective memory – and by extension, the cruelty of oblivion – as well as life committed to deciphering the universe, almost feels metaphysical in nature. It’s an accomplishment of visual poetry, then, how these little critters’  constant presence throughout the documentary ends up feeling like an allegory of something grander. 

However, director Lotta Petronella takes her time getting there. “In 1619, King Gustavus Adolphus II orders to build a hospital on a remote island on the Baltic Sea for leprosy patients,” she narrates with a calm voice in her first intervention, two and a half minutes into the film. It purpose is to gently set in motion the first of its two storylines at a leisurely pace that imitates the camera’s motion, dollying into a dark, blue-tinted hallway. “The King states that the rapid spreading of the disease is God’s punishment for a sinful life”, she continues, describing how the namesake island hospital later became an asylum for the disabled, elders, crippled war veterans, the mentally ill and, eventually, a place of banishment for women. 

“I visit the island in the middle of a coldest winter”, states Petronella through voice-over, as the ferry cuts through a frame of blue, icy waves. The personal motivations of her trip are better left unrevealed, but the filmmaker’s journey, to the small piece of land a few miles off Finland’s south-west coast, is also a plunge into the coldness of its cruel past. Whenever stillness and chilly colours dominate the screen– with either wide shots of the island’s desolate surroundings or compositions that divide the asylum’s already suffocating space into smaller frames – the director digs a little deeper into a history of unspoken solitude and injustice.

Little by little, the stories of women that were unjustly sent to the island are revealed through epistolary voiceover re-enactments. Women of the time were human beings cut off from a society for whom womanhood seemed like a condition comparable to leprosy, senility, or mental illness. Nearly two hundred of Camille Claudel’s sisters in suffering, robbed of their time, were abandoned to die in small cells and be condescendingly studied by male doctors – shouting into the void for someone to save them from nameless graves ­–  as their letters were arbitrarily confiscated.  Their lives resembled that of insects’, imprisoned in a jar.

As a stark contrast, the second, more uplifting storyline in Själo - Island of Souls, which intercuts back and forth with the first one,  is told through a different aesthetic with summer images of living things in warm colours and, most importantly, other women. They spend most of their time in what once were their predecessor’s cells, not by force but by their own free will. The hospital closed its doors in 1962, and  reopened as a research facility, a place for scientists who devote their lives to knowledge, for a year-round job of collecting samples and studying data.  This is a lifestyle of solitude that isn’t imposed, but chosen.  

The smallest life forms under the microscope seemingly take on the appearance of the universe itself. And so, the study of nature and insects in all forms and sizes, becomes by extension a gateway to possibility, purpose and fulfilment. The haunting tales of the wronged, silenced women, in Själo - Island of Souls,  can leave more of an impression after its trance of melancholy and silent rage is over, and must not be forgotten, making cinema a stepping stone towards a better world. But even if there’s still much to be done – in Finland and elsewhere – the testimonies of the present age show that the future, much like the little things living in the nooks and crannies of a forsaken Nordic island, can be full of promise and surprises.