Light Light Light

The summer of 1986. On the radio they are talking about an accident at a power station in a distant country; stay out of the rain, they say, do not pick mushrooms. In a small Finnish town Mimi comes into the life of the fifteen year old Mariia. Mimi has just moved there and a story about her mother has followed her. The two girls become friends, and then something else. The town is small and there is nobody to tell. Years later Mariia goes back to her childhood house and remembers that summer from the beginning. Inari Niemi directs. Juuli Niemi wrote the screenplay and the film is adapted from a 2011 novel by Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen. Rebekka Baer, Anni Iikkanen and Laura Birn are in the cast. It is a Finnish production. The film screened in the Just Film section in Tallinn in 2023. It won the queer film of the year award in Finland and the best feature prize at the Exgrund festival in Wiesbaden in Germany. The narrative runs in two times; the Mariia of today remembers and that summer comes alive. The accident stays in the background and is never described directly; it arrives through the warnings and the prohibitions on the radio. The matter it treats is the thing that cannot be said; the town's silence weighs more than the girls' relationship. The film also carries the trouble in Mimi's family and has a second burden. The narrative does not enlarge first love and does not soften its end. Its limit is structure; the narrative is slow, the remembering sections repeat, and the ending is heavy. Who it is for: viewers who like Nordic coming of age drama and stories set in the eighties. Who it is not for: it is slow, sorrowful, and the ending bitter.