Well… I didn’t expect to be so moved by a five minute, non-narrative short.
The film itself is cold like the landscape to start, even kind of sad. But the life that then comes waltzing into it really warms the heart.
The reasons it hit me are purely personal. I spent one of the happiest years of my life working in a school on the Spanish side of those hills; and one of the happiest days of that year on a school trip to the Portuguese part of a nearby national park.
What Kaurismäki says about the roads only arriving in the 1980’s is easy to believe, along with the fact that they took the young people away. Although it was…