100 Litres Of Gold

Some peculiarities about Finland have become common knowledge by now. Things like its natural landscape, blessed with thousand lakes, the people’s reserved behaviour, the tendency to fare well in risky sports that include high speed, the national obsession with karaoke and… their drinking culture. The latter does not include only drinking in bars, but also having home distilleries, moonshining, winemaking and brewing beer.

Regarding that, one should know a thing or two about “sahti”, the Finnish farmhouse ale. Made of malted and unmalted barley and rye, flavoured with juniper rather than hops and filtered through twigs in a tun called “kuurna”, it is usually way stronger than a regular beer, but sweet in flavour with some banana notes, while the colour varies from the palest of yellows to the darkest of browns. It is a popular drink, especially in the countryside, served from carafes at private and public gatherings such as parties, weddings and funerals. Caution in consuming it is highly advised: one could be easily fooled by its sweet taste and light flow, but the intoxication from it can even be fatal, one way or the other.

Sahti stands in the centre in 100 Litres of Gold, the newest film by Teemu Nikki - best known for his Euthanizer (2017) and The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic (2021) - and serves as its primary agent of action. The world premiere took place recently at Rome Film Festival, and the next screening that could launch its fruitful tour of festivals, happened in the International Competition of Tallinn Black Nights.

In the village of Sysmä, two best sahti brewers are the sisters Pirkko (Elina Knihtilä) and Taina (Pirjo Lonka) who live together and have nothing much else to do than to compete with other brewers, usually male, including their own father. Pirkko likes to “get high on her own supply” to the point of erratic behaviour usually ending with a blackout, while Taina seems to be more sensible one, but she is actually guilt-ridden by the car accident that crippled their third sister Päivi (Ria Kataja). She is coming to the hometown to get married to artist Nestori (Jakob Öhrman) and she wants 100 litres of her sisters’ best brew for the party.

That is exactly what they do, following all the strict steps in the procedure, so their final batch is a “perfect ten”. Tasting it, they get carried away that they end in a days-long blackout realising that they drank or shared the whole 100 litres and burned all the money they owned on the side. They have only two days to get to the new batch of booze, with a side-quest of collecting all the debts from the people who owe them, to be able to pay for it. Given that they are in the middle of the feud with their primary competitor Poiju-Paavo (Jari Pehkonen), they can rely only on the help of the polite, but awkward Hauki (Ville Tiihonen) who is hopelessly in love with Pirkko.

A crazy adventure with boozing, quarrelling, fighting, theft, accidents and whatnot ensues, spiked with a tons of plot twists that often pull the proverbial rug under the feet of the viewers as well as the characters. The western-like accessories, such as the title design, the presence of the old, banged-up American cars, the cowboy hats and the “rautalanka” music that is basically a Finnish variant of the country-infused folk-rock, go perfectly hand in hand with the plot revolving around the small-town animosities and two sisters’ quest to make something right for once in the lifetime. The sun-lit landscape of the summertime also helps a lot with setting a good mood.

But coming from Nikki, we might assume that it is not all lightweight, fun and games here. On the contrary, the filmmaker aims for some deep emotions under the surface of a semi-silly screwball plot that does not shy even from some completely ridiculous slapstick interventions, and he manages to mine them from the organic characters, their deep traumas and their relationships. The actors go for broke with their seemingly deadpan interpretations before shedding the layers of mask to expose the characters’ true nature and the amount of the emotional damage they have suffered from the poor choices they made or for the stroke of bad luck.

In the end, the silliness easily and organically transforms into warmth and a heart-felt experience, proving that Nikki is a master story-teller who certainly knows a few things about the human nature. It comes pretty close to the level of pure gold.