Summer Rebellion
Feb 15, 2008
Jaakko Pakkasvirta, Finland, 1969, 80 min
Sponsored by the Finlandia Foundation, UW Department of Scandinavian Studies, American Scandinavian Foundation
Young photography model Susanna and her alienated teenage brother Veli spend the summer of 1969 traveling around Finland, mostly with another girl and her boyfriend. Sporting the latest fashions and trendy hairdos, they naïvely observe and criticize the modern consumer society, with its advertisements, expensive homes, and fancy lifestyles. The film delivers a political agenda with a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary observations, witty fake commercials, contrived interviews, and a jazzy soundtrack by the prog-rock group Wigwam.