Reset

Reset is a subtle and painterly study of a couple going through a miscarriage, and who have to decide if they will get through the trauma together or get separated. Film that we made as an exercise for the National Film and Television School. It was also my first collaboration with many artists who would become important to me later. With cinematorgrapher Tristan Chenais, Editor Yann Heckmann, and composer Lyndon Holland we went to do many films at NFTS. I would also be using actors Geoffrey Newland and Beatrice Curnew for major roles in my later work.

RESET, 6 minutes, NFTS 2012 Cast: Beatrice Curnew, Geoffrey Newland, Anita Booth
Written & Directed by: Pekka Saari, Cinematographer Tristan Chenais, Editor: Yann Heckmann

Reminisce

As usual the process started with the knowledge that you would need to make a film, but this time I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. Luckily my cinematographer Tristan had couple of ideas so we had a brief talk and we decided to do something natural and organic, something human, visual and touching. There themes around relationships and families that we both found interesting, and we also both wanted to do something quite painterly and beautiful.

After that everything went quickly. I remembered a couple I had briefly known few years ago, how happy they were when the wife started expecting and how devastating it was when they had a miscarriage. I also remember how surprised I was about the very strong and lasting reaction it had on them. I just had never thoughed about it, as I think most of the people don’t. The story and way to tackle it got molded by discussions with actors and members of the crew, staff and tutors at the school, and it came apparent that almost everybody had some kind of a connection to it. “It is a death that we don’t regocnise as a death” I remember one of my collegues saying.

Film was shot in 3 days at the film school with a skeleton crew. It was shot on film and we got a very simple one light film transfer, and because we liked the crappy look we never color graded the film. This explains why film doesn’t look polished, it isn’t and I quite like the roughness of it.