Home Recordings

A man and a woman are sitting on a coach, contemplating their relationship. He feels empty. She feels rejected and wants to be surprised. He says: 'Je moet ook eens de boel de boel laten' (Just leave things as they are). She is unfamiliar with this Dutch expression and becomes obstreperous. In a countermove, she starts talking Finnish. Bull's eye! The woman is the director of this film, the man her husband-composer who wrote the soundtrack. With her documentary Family Files (2002), Mari Soppela already dipped into the emotionally charged history of her family. Home Recordings is even more personal. An assorted mosaic of images from her ten-year marriage reveals playful happiness, the joy for their children and wearisome worries. Today, the most trivial inconvenience may spark a row that has to be resolved in therapy. 'By making this film, we share our intimacy with the world, but we haven't managed to share it with each other', Soppela says somewhere. 'Or have we just started?' 'Yes, a lot has happened,' her husband says. The irritations provide the raw material for a song.