Never Alone (Ei Koskaan Yksin)

Finnish hero fights in order to stop authorities from handing Jews over to Nazis, in this very familiar battle of good versus evil - from the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

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Director Klaus Härö’s new film dramatises the efforts of the Finnish Jew Abraham Stiller (Ville Virtanen) to prevent Finnish authorities from handing over immigrant Jews to the Gestapo (a first step that would surely escalate and endanger all Finnish Jews). It shares a little with Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) the holocaust-prevention sub-genre’s standard bearer (a much more Zionist film than Never Alone), but it really has more in common with last year’s One Life (James Hawes). Like One Life, Never Alone frames itself from the historical “present” (which isn’t necessarily our present) and moves back and forth across time through the recollection of the life-saving and genocide-fighting hero. In the “present” of both films, others force the hesitant protagonists to recollect their great deeds – a framing that allows them to remain humble and worth celebrating while they remain in perpetual mourning for the souls they failed to save.

Härö makes an interesting directorial choice by shooting the present in black and white and the past in colour. Instead of the past feeling distanced through its inability to achieve colour, the present does. The scenes in the present are admittedly thin, and a film of just 85 minutes. This limits its to reverberate into our present crises. Härö approaches a profound observation through this stylistic choice and never fully embraces it in the screenplay’s short time spent with Stiller in his elderly years: Heroism of this sort is now a relic of our past.

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