Eight Deadly Shots

Inspired by true events, this four-part television film from 1972, running over five hours, is a long-overlooked landmark of Finnish cinema and the magnum opus of filmmaker Mikko Niskanen (1929-1990). Niskanen wrote the screenplay, directed the film and also played the lead role. Its protagonist, Pasi, is a farmer struggling to support his family through relentless hard work, seeking solace in alcohol – a refuge that fuels tensions at home and gradually leads him into conflict with the law and towards self-destruction.

Film historian and director Peter von Bagh, who tirelessly championed the film’s restoration, wrote in The Four Seasons of Drinking (Encore, 2012): “It is compared by some to the work of Béla Tarr, while others, more classically, maintain that it is what the full nine hours of Greed might have been like”. He added: “The film concentrates strictly on the familiar elements of everyday life, yet seems to float in a strange realm of unknown dimensions, at once psycho logical, hallucinatory, and concrete, abounding in observations with a sharp and sometimes merciless anthropological edge”.

Writing for Sight and Sound on 5 October 2022, ahead of that year’s BFI London Film Festival, Thomas Flew noted: “Also moving from the small to the big screen, after a rapturous reception at this summer’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, is Finnish miniseries Eight Deadly Shots (1972), which is, for BFI head curator and LFF Treasures strand programmer Robin Baker “almost the star attraction” of the festival”. Of the five-hour series (…) he says: “Everybody I spoke to who saw it at Cinema Ritrovato described it as not only their film of the festival but also one of the best they’d seen for years. Having that kind of discovery, I can’t imagine it could be anything else other than one of the hits of the festival”.

The film inspired an entire generation of Finnish filmmakers, including Aki Kaurismäki, who called the miniseries “one of the masterpieces of European cinema”.

Roman Gutek

The screening will follow the schedule below:

• part 1 – 81 min,
• part 2 – 82 min,
• break – 20 min,
• part 3 – 88 min,
• part 4 – 76 min.

Mikko Niskanen (1929–1990) – Finnish director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. Working in a realist vein, he focused on the social problems of rural Finland and the experiences of the younger generation. He directed over forty films, including Pojat and Eight Deadly Shots, widely regarded as his masterpiece. An eight-time recipient of the Jussi Award, he remains one of the most important figures in Finnish cinema.