Lau Nau has composed the original music score for Lotta Petronella’s film “Home. Somewhere” (Hem. Någonstans”). The score is composed, produced, edited and mixed by Laura Naukkarinen and played, arranged & recorded by Laura Naukkarinen and Pekko Käppi.
The music soundtrack will be released as an album in spring 2015.
The film festival DocPoint included the category Critic’s Choice, where American film critic John Anderson chose three of his favourites from the New Finnish Documentary Films series, one of which was HOME. Somewhere. This is what he writes:
“Formally precise, emotionally profound, Home. Somewhere. gives a poetic voice to people who have never traditionally had one, men who maintain a combative relationship with both God and the Earth – and, somehow predictably, live and work at the edge of the sea. They have a tenuous grasp on the meaning of life, but only because they’ve had the time and inclination to regard it, from a vantage point at the end of the world.
“Anything can be dramatic,” says one, with a dismissive shrug at his own significance. “But one human life is not.” Director Lotta Petronella would beg to differ.
If there’s a storyline at the heart of Home, it is directly rooted in the cosmological; the filmmaker has made a true and honest work about madly elusive matters, including self-worth, self-reliance and the existential self. The great gray expanses she shows, and the oceanic void that seems to exist just off camera, suggest melancholy, a quality mentioned several times in the course of the film. (One of the subjects defines it as the feeling one has in the process of losing something – as opposed to sadness, which is the feeling of loss). But what’s being felt by these men also seems like nostalgia – a yearning for something one might never have known at all, in this case a place in the world that is solid and settled and, as the title implies, home.
How the subjects express themselves, while roaming the forests, killing a seal, plucking a bird or cleaning a fish, is made eloquent by Petronella’s style, which involves regularly shooting her subjects from behind, the figure within the frame always moving forward, face and destination unseen and sometimes unknown. She places her men in an always suggestive proximity to their environment: Intended or not, one snow-suited subject, wrestling himself out of a hole in the ice, gives a credible impersonation of childbirth – a newborn sprung from a world in which temperatures are rising, ice is disappearing, terra cognita is being deformed/destroyed and everything familiar is melting away.
Home. Somewhere. may be more a movie about the environment of the mind than the world, but its regard of the ecology cannot be overlooked.
The sea and sky are Petronella’s indispensable confederates, but so are Lau Nau and Micke Nyström. Nau’s music suggest the mournful cry of the drifting human soul; Nyström’s sound design is an intoxicant. Together they elevate the entire experience of Home. Somewhere. and provide invaluable assistance to Petronella in achieving her goal: Elevating the anonymous and unsung, and ennobling their search for meaning. Documentaries seldom attempt anything so simple, or hope to achieve so much.”
About the film:
Men are living their lives and doing their things in places where land meets the boundless sea, and where life, and the whole human body, are connected with the surrounding nature. The ever-changing sky, the infinite sea and the windy land are nature’s basic elements. Amid them the men contemplate the basic questions of life and their own relationship with their surroundings. “If the sea and the fish would disappear, a part of me would disappear as well”, one of them says.
The documentarist follows men to the misty sea, on flimsy ice and summery cliffs, and to the seaside grove. The sea is heard on the soundtrack as a humming roar, seagus’s screams and the whistling of heaving slush of ice. In scenery like this, thoughts have room to wander. “Who am I” and “What makes a home” are questions that arise on the shore of the infinite. The sea affects people. It makes us wonder about things and their proportions. Sometimes it causes longing, feelings of being lost, and melancholy. But at the same time, it is difficult to come up with anything more beautiful. As one of the men says: “This landscape is love of certain kind”.
Directed by Lotta Petronella
Produced by Leila Lyytikäinen
Fisher King Production