"UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON"
an Antero Alli film
(2003; 96 min. USA)
The Story Behind the Moon
© 2009 Antero Alli
Life has been complex, troubling, mystifying yet also strangely blessed. If I were to view mine from the pitch black skies beyond time and space, I'd see an ultra-slow motion shipwreck in progress unfolding the grandeur, terror, beauty, tragedy, and serenity of its inevitable fate. Dramatic? Perhaps. Uncommon? Not really. I think anyone totally honest with him-or-herself might see and say something similar. Failure is not the enemy; stupidity is – especially the stupidity of repeating the same failures. In learning from failures, I have discovered a success in the freedom to make new mistakes.
As is probably common with others who have survived beyond the 50 year mark, I have also been looking back to my roots to understand my present-time circumstances. Not as an idea or an image or some personal issue of pride but rather, how a larger cultural and genetic influence has shaped my life without me knowing it.
Though I was born in Finland and retain Finnish citizenship, my life seems to have unfolded as a hybrid of old-world matriarchy and west-coast subcultures. In 1955, we (my mother, grandmother, brother and I) abandon my father in Helsinki and migrate to Toronto, where we stay for seven years before one final journey westward to Los Angeles on May 23, 1962. Here my ambitious mother Kaija establishes her career as a successful photo-journalist interviewing Hollywood icons; grandma Rakel finds steady employment as a physical therapist. Meanwhile, my younger brother and I have the time of our young lives as teenage hippies during the psychedelic sixties. We also share the fate of being raised by two strong Finnish women.
My earliest personal history and Suomi genes continue influencing my life today, in ways both obvious and mysterious. One manifestation took the form of my fifth independent feature movie, "Under a Shipwrecked Moon". The story follows a young self-made shamanic punk rocker who searches the spirit world for his father, a ship captain who drowned at sea, and unexpectedly enters the dreams of his comatose Finnish grandfather. As the grandfather sleeps, his earthbound family gathers around his hospital bedside with their own secrets, demands and stories to share in a surreal fable of true love, giant hedgehogs and the mystical depths of family bonds.
With all due respect to Saami shamanic culture, I never set out to mimic those ancient traditions or to make a "shamanic movie" yet somehow this archetype found its way into the heart of my story. Was it the Saami in my own genes? Or something I ate years ago? Though I have long since stopped any drug use (beyond fine wine), I do recall my teenage years in the psychedelic sixties with its countless visionary trips induced by various psychoactive agents. The supernatural beauty and infinite complexity of life, as revealed in those experiences, forced me to live "as a warrior spirit", if only to fight for my sanity and personal truth amidst a society that defined my "vision quests" as immoral and illegal. To live as a warrior spirit meant to live more honestly, to learn how to see and think for myself and, arrive at my own conclusions, whether they are right or not. I never consciously tried to "be a shaman" yet, at the risk of sounding pretentious, perhaps I've been living by an, albeit urban, shamanic code all this time.
As a filmmaker, I am constantly searching for new ways to share my perceptions and feelings with the world through stories, characters, music and a myraid of visual and audio effects. The cinematic challenge here was to create a visual, musical and sonic experience for the audience to represent the young punk rocker's mystical states. Now I don't think it is possible to replicate – no matter how many computers we have –- those visions of ineffable beauty that I have known and loved. And so I chose to focus on the connections between his dream world and the so-called real world of his family relations to express his spirituality. What I personally know of mystical experience has been revealed in those shimmering revelations of unity, where the world of dreams and the everyday mundane world overlap, intermingle and exchange information, constantly; mysticism as direct experience of the unity of life.
- ANTERO ALLI
writer/director/cinematographer
UNDER A SHIPWRECKED MOON --
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