GOING PLACES: Donald Clarke travels inside the Arctic circle to the strange occasion that is Finland's Midnight Sun Film Festival.
The Finnish national sport is a high-taxation variant of baseball named pesäpallo in which, rather than hurling the ball straight at his opponent, the pitcher, who seems to be a neutral figure, propels it straight up in the air from a position by the batter's side. When the ball eventually comes down it is - on more or less every occasion from what I could judge - then clobbered halfway to Russia.
There is, to the outsider, a great deal that is quintessentially Finnish about pesäpallo: it is familiar, yet very foreign; it has as much to do with co-operation as competition and, most importantly, it seems to rely on a healthy appreciation of the absurd.
Much of the above could also be said of the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Lapland. For 19 years, the world's finest film-makers - previous guests have included Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Terry Gilliam and Paul Schrader - have made their way to a remote village above the Arctic Circle at a time of year when the sun never dips below the horizon. Why would they do that? Surely perpetual daylight is the last thing you need during a film festival.
Peter von Bagh, the festival's stern, slightly intimidating director, explains: "A Finnish film-maker, Anssi Mänttäri, was here in the darkest winter in a bar and looked out at the endless darkness and thought we should do a film festival. At that extreme period of darkness there was a rightness to the idea."
Well, quite.
"But of course it was impossible to organise it during the winter. Nobody would come. It would be just intolerable."
So Mänttäri turned the idea on its head and decided to run the festival during mid-summer. He was fortunate in his collaborators. Von Bagh, one of the world's great film writers (and a member of this year's Cannes jury), came on board as director, and Finland's most famous film-makers, the brothers Aki and Mika Kaurismäki, were eager to lend support. The first event took place in 1986 and welcomed as guests Demme, Bertrand Tavernier and the great American maverick, Sam Fuller. Eighteen years later, a sign still identifies one of Sodankylä's main thoroughfares as "Samuel Fuller Street".
"I'm afraid that is only during the festival," von Bagh says morosely. "I am very bitter about that. I think that it is tasteless that is only called that during the festival."
To get to Sodankylä from anywhere other than Finland you have to fly to Helsinki then take another plane to Rovaniemi - the capital of Lapland and the place where awful parents take spoilt children to meet Santa - then get in a car alongside the renowned Italian director Nanni Moretti (or at least that is how it was for me) and keep driving north.
After an hour and a half of swerving past reindeer - scruffy, grey beasts none of whose noses appeared in any way suitable for guiding my sleigh tonight - we trundled into tiny Sodankylä with its boxy modern houses and ugly shop-fronts. The only bright colour in view was the bubblegum-pink of an elderly car trundling down Sam Fuller Street.
Much later on, over a traditional Finnish meal of flattened cattle pancreas, my new friend Liselott explained that the reason the town is so lacking in old-world Arctic charm is that it had to be hurriedly rebuilt after the war when the Germans burnt it and much of the rest of Lapland to the ground.
No matter. With 6,000 to 7,000 mostly Finnish movie fanatics packed into a town the size of, I would guess, Skerries, the Midnight Sun Festival offers a quite extraordinary film-going experience. As well as Moretti, this year's guests included Wolfgang Becker, director of Good bye Lenin!, the Russian veteran Marlen Hutsijev and, most pleasingly, the 92-year-old British genre specialist Val Guest.
Guest, director of such durable classics as The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Quatermass Xperiment and (in collaboration with many others) Casino Royale, was effusive about the festival's delights. "Oh, they treat you like family," he says. "We have been to so many of these festivals throughout the world. This is the first one that has been without any nonsense. It is informal. People are coming to see films rather than be seen."
This sums the event up quite nicely. You won't catch many of the new releases at Sodankylä, but you will see terrific retrospectives, newly unearthed obscurities and, best of all, great silent movies with live musical accompaniment. This year, packed into a slightly leaky circus tent, we thrilled to a screening of Jacques Feyder's sentimental fable Faces of Children with a gorgeous score written by Antonio Coppola (no relation) and played by the chamber orchestra Octuor de France.
As Von Bagh put it to me: "We really do concentrate on films here and it is easy to do because when people come here they really have next to nothing else to do."
Well, this is not quite true. There are two other things to do and one of them is drink. Before I left Ireland, my friends, adopting the attitude to the blackness of kettles proverbially held by pots, all warned me how much the Finns could put away. And on my first night in the festival club at the Hotel Sodankylä I did spot quite a few stonewashed, mulleted depressives draining bathtubs of the local beer, Lapin Kulta. But the full exposure to Finnish bibulousness came with the annual jaunt to the Porttikoski rapids. As night fell and the sun didn't, we were served salmon, beer and vodka from convincingly ethnic-looking wigwams while mosquitoes the size of barn owls swarmed menacingly over an angry river.
It was here some years ago that the festival nearly killed one of the world's greatest film directors. I have been sworn to secrecy on the precise details, but the Oscar-winning auteur, whacked out on the local hooch, steamed himself to a prune in the sauna and then plunged into the river before the organisers could warn him that heart-attacks caused by just such a combination of booze and sharp variations in body temperature were one of the main killers of younger Finnish men. The handlers had a few anxious moments to imagine the headlines in Variety - "Boozed Helmer croaks at Finnish fest" - before their honoured guest bobbed happily back to the surface.
Anyway, within, it seems, minutes of us arriving at the wooded glade everybody was - quite literally - falling down drunk. The fact that the event was taking place in an area littered with knobbly boulders did not, admittedly, help the guests keep stable, but I have not seen so many people crashing onto their arses since ... well, since the last Irish film festival I attended.
As we waited for the bus to take us back to Sodankylä, I chatted to a very civilised and very animated young cineaste. Oh, I was from Ireland, she remarked, reaching into her handbag.
This being the day after the centennial Bloomsday, I waited for yet another copy of Ulysses to be waved in my face, but instead she produced a full-size bottle of Jameson's, the missing half of which was, I would judge, already inside her. "It's a long journey back," she laughed.
The whole Sodankylä experience is, to get back to the pesäpallo analogy, a delightfully unsettling mix of the familiar and the strange. By day, the locals seem reserved, disciplined and stoic; by night (or what passes for night here) they display near-Celtic levels of shoutiness.
Just as you are deciding that the surrounding landscape resembles a slightly wetter, slightly flatter version of Wicklow, you will be knocked to the ground by a reindeer fleeing a similarly sized mosquito.
And, of course, there is that sun. Emerging from the cinema at 1 a.m., distracted by thoughts of the fine Iranian film I had just seen, I was momentarily astounded to be greeted by blazing daylight. A gorgeously weird mist was rising off the river and, my brain uncharacteristically taken up with pastoral ecstasy, I mused that this just might be one of the things you have to see before you die.
Earlier I had talked to Michael Henry Wilson, the esteemed film academic, about the strange business of movie-going in perpetual daylight. "It's perfect because movies are dreams anyway," he said. "Whether you dream inside or outside it doesn't matter. When you come out and see the sun at night it is like you are still dreaming."
www.msfilmfestival.fi/