Orenda — Pirjo Honkasalo [IFFR ’25 Review]

Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views” to a completely foreign Baltic context. Even the title came from Japan’s Lake Biwa in the  Shiga Prefecture. This year’s Orenda, a Finnish-Estonian co-production with additional support from Sweden, is also in debt to another culture. This time the place of inspiration (or fetishization) is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people indigenous to North America. The word “orenda” comes from their culture — though the film doesn’t verbalize that — and refers to a panentheistic invisible power present in all things and all people. Orenda opens the door to a new trend in Baltic and Nordic cinema, which hovers somewhere between inspiration and exoticization in a strenuous effort to tell incredibly patient and artistically labyrinthine stories.

Fresh off her incredible performance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Alma Pöysti plays Nora, a successful opera singer and grieving widow (in that order). She has come to a remote island occasionally reminiscent of the depressive coasts’ Ireland is often depicted with to honor her belated spouse’s final request for a specific pastor to preside over his final moment (on the island). The priest is Natalia (Pirkko Saisio, also the film’s writer), and she is in the middle of her own Dark Night of the Soul. These two characters’ antagonism, unspoken respect, and shared processing bring the best out of the two actors.

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