Rare public screening of Jarva’s DIARY OF A WORKER (1967) at the SSEES 100 Film Festival

30/10/2015 / Festivals / No Comments

On Tuesday 3rd of November, the SSEES Centenary Film Festival will show a 1967 Finnish drama film Työmiehen päiväkirja (Diary of a Worker, also released as Not by Bread Alone), directed by Risto Jarva.

Risto Jarva was a central figure in the Finnish New Wave. His career is one of the most significant in the Finnish cinema history, even though he died in a car accident at the age of 43. The focus of Jarva’s work is on the human being between society and nature. The topics of his movies are omnitemporal: the tense relations between man and woman, individual and society, nature and technology – and how they can be solved.

DIARY OF A WORKER was Jarva’s breakthrough piece, “the first Finnish worker movie“, that started a fashion of tackling societal issues in cinema.

The film will be introduced by Dr Essi Viitanen, the author of ‘Refracting Space: Navigating the Suburban Milieu in Finnish Film, 1960-1980’ (PhD, UCL SSEES, 2014).

Essi comments on the event:

Director Risto Jarva had a seminal role in defining the style of the Finnish New Wave. This rare public screening of Jarva’s 1967 breakthrough film DIARY OF A WORKER offers a snapshot of the Finnish home and family at a time when urbanisation, development of welfare state policies and architectural change were redefining Finnish life. The film highlights the social and political gulf separating the post-war generation from their parents, while Jarva’s innovative way of blending documentary methods into fictional narrative challenges conventional cinematic style.”