The Earth Is a Sinful Song

Finnish Lapland, the end of the 1940s. Martta, a young woman in a small village, attaches herself to Oula, a Sámi reindeer herder. When she turns out to be pregnant her hard-drinking father is enraged, and things move somewhere nobody can pull them back from. Adapting Timo K. Mukka's first novel, Rauni Mollberg shot on location in the Lapland landscape itself, and weather, mud, animals and daily labour make up the texture of the film. Sex and violence are as explicit here as they were on the page; Mukka's book had caused an argument in Finland when it was published. The film still became one of the most widely seen productions in Finnish cinema and travelled the international festival circuit in 1974. This is not a rural love story so much as the story of what a closed community does to a young woman.