Fuck Off! Images from Finland

The documentary looks at Finland as a developing welfare state with no deference at all toward the authorities. It gives its weight to those left outside: low paid workers and the unemployed. In the desolate provinces people either submit to their fate, choose to move to Sweden, or take refuge in heavy drinking. The images are accompanied by protest songs made from the director’s own prose and from a poet’s words. The film’s anger is aimed at big business and the political elite. Its jagged and deliberately ugly visual language matches the underground movement and the radical politics of the period. Though it is against censorship, the film itself pushes at the limits of people’s privacy. The ninety six minute Finnish documentary by Erkki Seiro, Jorn Donner and Jaakko Talaskivi was completed in 1971.