In a small coastal town on the Faroe Islands, a compact factory thrums away. Inside, a steel-faced Kári (Sámal H. Hansen) toils away amongst other factory workers, gutting fish in time with the rhythm of the conveyor belt. To us it may seem like this cold and calculated work is the result of tortuous boredom. But to director Sakaris Stórá, this couldn’t be farther from the truth:
“I used to work in a factory like that myself for three years. I did that instead of going to college, so I wanted the factory to be portrayed very honestly, because it's very easy to romanticise that kind of work in film. I wanted it to feel the way I felt when working there. Routines almost became a form of meditation.”
Kári’s work is a spiritual process, not a cause for his listlessness but a treatment for it. And while other Faroese may want to escape what they believe to be a dying island, Kári believes The Last Paradise on Earth, as well as his relatively simple life there, are not only worth salvaging but protecting.
Stórá, being Faroese himself, is passionate about displaying the Island’s reality – good or bad. For him the island’s beauty could not be captured by “overglorifying the landscape”. Letting the environment speak for itself was a top priority if he felt the film was going to succeed:
“We had a strict rule to shoot everything on location. There are two scenes that are not shot in the same town, and it's like, the interior of a store and and this pit where he finds the old boat, but everything else is shot in the same town. When you see nature in that film, it is because nature exists [inherently] in the scenes by existing information.”
That extends to the actors, who all “[came] from the Fároe Islands” themselves. However, many were new to the small town where they shot Last Paradise, as many of the performers, “especially the younger ones”, had not been exposed to life outside the main city. Rather than seeing this as a challenge, Stórá saw a unique opportunity to show his own people what life on a remote fishing town looks and feels like:
“I think [everyone] gained a lot of respect for the working communities, and got in touch with that. It was interesting because [Bjørg B. Egholm] had never been in front of a camera before, and [Hansen], even though he had a small part in one of my previous films, didn't have that much experience either. So it was very much like working together with them to create [their] characters. It was a very long but equally giving process.”
The class divide between workers like Kári permeates throughout the small town of Last Paradise. When he’s tasked to deliver several Confirmation cards – Confirmation being the Lutheran equivalent of a Jewish bar mitzvah – to prospective 15 year olds, he’s left gutted by how their houses compare to his. High ceilinged, spacious and rowdy with loving family members, their homes are in stark contrast to Kári’s: a desolate shack piled with dirty dishes, a broken toilet with no running water and walls yellowed by old and peeling wallpaper. And with a father barely at home, and a mother recently passed, Kári and his younger sister Silja (Egholm) are forced to fend for themselves.
Leaving the island is also seen as something aspirational for most of the families, working class or not, and Kári often finds himself under the same pressure to take the plunge with everyone else. But with a job he loves always waiting for him, he finds no reason why he should. Despite the lack of resources and shelter and connections. His job is the thing that keeps him going. But what happens when his full time work becomes a couple days a week and eventually vanishes altogether? For people like Stórá, even when you’re in a situation where you love what you do, as resources dwindle and job security becomes scarce, all it takes is a tick of approval from an offshore CEO and one word from upper management, and suddenly you have nothing to do. Like Kári, Stórá too was left stranded by his employer:
“The factory where I worked shut down in the same way. And that is something that is happening around the world as well. These small towns that are reliant on factories are almost dying out because of the [larger corporations that take over production]. I wanted to situate us with characters who were in the midst of experiencing that shift.”
When Kári’s best friend and co-worker Reign (Bjørn M. Mohr) says things like “Only factories that trade people for robots will survive[,]” he’s not just referring to some type of automation. CEOs want disposable people; people who work day in and day out without complaint. And for all intents and purposes, Kári – with his stone face and hyperfocus over his work – fits that bill perfectly. But is that really the case? Reign may be more expressive than Kári, but he still bottles up his emotions all the same. It’s just that he copes with it through drinking instead of work. And Kári’s father isn’t much better than his son, choosing to not only work instead of addressing his uncomfortable feelings, but work off-land just to be able to get away from the island. According to Stórá, Kári struggles to convey his feelings to his friends and family is not his to bare alone but a much broader problem – Masculinity:
“Men don't speak about emotions and that’s very much present in the film, especially through the father character. And Kári to some extent is afraid of becoming like him. I wanted to link men’s difficulty of [openly communicating how they feel] with how it leads them to falling out of society. As I think it’s much better to look at the causation of toxic masculinity, rather than the disease itself.”
Coping mechanisms are not an inherently bad thing, but combined with our view of how men should behave, compartmentalising emotions becomes impossible. If all emotions are bottled equally, then how can we even discern them? If Silja is openly suffering, and Kári can even process what she’s going through, why cannot he not just tell her that? Why do his words seize up in his throat? It’s because he’s never let himself feel and work through any of the same emotions.
But there’s one particular emotion looming over the island that no one – man or woman – wants to talk about. No one wants to grieve. Fisherman don’t want to grieve the dead ocean full of Fulmar carcasses that wash up on shore thanks to the extreme “change in nature”; Workers don’t want to grieve their dead-end jobs and would rather leave their dying island; and Kári and his family don’t want to grieve the loss of his mother. But while it’s never said, Stóra believes that their grief manifests in the things they do instead:
“Many characters resort to different ways of coping over the loss of Kári’s mother. Like his father, who escapes back to [working on] a fishing boat, is one of these men [that runs away from the emotions he’s unwilling to face head on]. But like most locals he’s also spent most of his life on [that] boat, and kind of knows that as his home.”
But it’s ironically Kári, who, while not perfect in expressing his feelings, is much healthier in coping than the others, and by the end of the film, we as audiences members begin to realise that the film wasn’t really about Kári learning to understand others, but for us to understand Kári:
“His way of coping is to [immerse himself] in routines and enjoy the small things that he has around him. He’s a kind of anti thesis to the trend of everyone having to be someone and do something, that it's okay to not have these big ambitions.”
The Last Paradise for Stórá is more than a detailed picture of his hometown, it’s a reminder that many things are left unacknowledged. Whether it’s the significance of everyday tasks, the importance of opening up, or larger threats like climate change or job security, we’d rather just forget about it. But for the people who stick it out, who stay when others have lost hope of making any difference, all it takes is a little change. Because when “small communities” change themselves for the better “society changes as well.”