On the Tenderness of Men

On the Tenderness of Men is a work of speculative non-fiction attending to neglected fragments of Finnish cultural history and drawing on documents from local archives relating architecture, war, and displacement. 

The film takes the controversies around the construction of the so-called Rock Church in Helsinki during the time of the Nigerian-Biafran War and its architects’ exclusion from the canon of Finnish modernism as a starting point to ruminate on intercommunal othering. 

The voice-over mixes expositional writing with prose, poetry and citations, braiding multiple narratives and temporalities. The film ventriloquizes an assortment of speakers collapsing time, place and identities narratively to consider the impact of atrocities on contemporary lifeworlds.

Director’s statement :

On the Tenderness of Men is a speculative work about architecture, war, and displacement and its narrated by one female voice merging many histories and identities from the Winter War of 1939 to the present day. This renders any certainty about who is the speaker unstable. Past and present, geographies and temporalities, fold into one another, completely collapsing time, place and identities narratively. The narrative ends up forming elliptical shapes. This is also reflected in the visual aesthetics of the film, and springs from the circular spatial design of the Rock Church itself, an otherworldly building in central Helsinki which the film historicises, albeit in fragmented ways. The whole film feels very intimate. Each word is placed with great care, giving the impression of something very personal, but there are hardly any autobiographical elements in it. I wanted to see what would happen (to the viewing experience) when adopting the voices and perspectives of many others as my own.