The Border

Spring 1918, just after the Finnish Civil War. A young officer is sent to the village of Rajajoki with orders to establish a border between Finland and Soviet Russia. On paper the job is simple: draw a line and it will be clear who is where. In the field, white and red, friend and enemy, us and them do not separate. Lauri Törhönen's film is about how decisions taken as correct turn out wrong, and how attempts to correct them make things bigger. The screenplay comes from a story told by Jörn Donner, out of the diaries of his father Kaj Donner. The film tries to hold the violence and the arbitrariness of the immediate post-war period at a neutral distance; it absolves neither the whites nor the reds. Martin Bahne plays the officer.