QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Art masquerades in many shapes and sizes – from provocative to plaintive, from poetry to painting. Karin Pennanen was aware that her late uncle Markku Pennanen had predilections for idiosyncratic mindsets, but she had no idea about the vast array of video clips, audio diaries, notes and personal writings he had left behind. She takes it upon herself to commemorate his work via documentary, in the hope of completing his legacy.
This 86-minute documentary succeeds at restoring the old footage to a near-glorious sheen. A funny clip of teenagers pushing vehicles through the snow to pictures of The Beatles is a whimsical joy, and a scene in which a young woman moves up close to a projection of Marrku’s psychedelic camerawork is dipped in fragility and beauty.
Days of Wonder draws the recently released A Pale View of Hills (Kei Ishikawa, 2025) to mind in that both of these features are about dialogues between people separated by time and societal shifts. In the two instances, one character turns to a deceased person for guidance in how to best carry on with their lives. Similarly, the doublet of movies – one a docudrama, the other an adaptation of a fairly underwhelming book by Kazuo Ishiguro – fall under the weight of their ambition. Karin Pennanen rarely gets a closer perspective of her relative as a person. Instead, the director offers viewers a glimpse at his art, however out of context to when it was were created.
This Finnish feature is an overreach. The director never truly gets a handle of what made her late uncle tick. As much as Pennanen tries to form a narrative – or a coherent line – between her contemporary reality and the madder time this family-member inhabited, nothing of great solidity comes together. Images flicker on the screen, but they never coalesce into anything mind-blowing or even meaningful. The lessons gleamed are the ones that seem obvious to the viewer from the beginning: creating art is great fun.
One protagonist understands that were was a more jocular side to this documentary subject than she may have realised, but that’s largely the only discovery. “You’re both familiar and strange”, comes a voiceover, contrasting a life spent in an ordinary job to the bohemian home videos he created. Glaringly, these installations jump from era to era, without cluing the viewer in to the process. Style is upheld over substance, to the detriment of the work.
Days of Wonder, despite the movie name, is fairly monotonous viewing, particularly in the more modern-day sections. Talking heads nod and shake at the art pieces, unsure how to comment about Marrku’s “hobby”. The older archive footage is sparky, but by its nature incomplete. There is no denying Markku’s talent: a portrait of a centaur shows remarkable dexterity. The problem is that director is more interested in spying on the work than investigating its significance.
The outcome is an ode of an idiosyncratic individual best remembered in death, and a patchy feature film.
Days of Wonder just premiered in the Doc@PÖFF International Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
