Saara Cantell – Director
In brief - the story of Unna and Nuuk is about an eleven-year old girl Unna who ends up, with the help of shaman drum, 4,000 years back into the time of the Stone Age. She is looking for a cure for her ill grandfather, and meets a boy named Nuuk, and together they get involved in some quite wild adventures.
The big themes in this film are conquering the fear of strangers, the importance and meaning of knowledge passed on from one generation to another, and also how the power of co-operation can solve problems.
One of the special traits of this film is that since it is set in the Stone Age, the language spoken is the early proto-Finnish - we have had a linguistic expert translating dialogue. There is also another tribe, the "Hammer-Axe" people, and their dialogue is like ancient Icelandic, an archaic Germanic language.
We have built a dam that bursts, and we have some amount of animals in footage, like an owl, hedgehog or rabbit, and soon we'll also get a wolf. They need their own special arrangements. Perhaps the funniest thing is this often absurd-looking contradiction - you look besides the camera, and you see people among their completely modern equipments and then some people in their role-costumes.
At the moment I feel that the climate of attitude in Finland is right, in the sense that people understand and are willing to invest in this thing so the stuff made for children can be just as ambitious as anything else.
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