Hard to Break is an intimate, unadorned description of the youth of the 2020s with their joys and difficulties.
Document
Hard to break, directed by Anna-Maija Heinonen, Krista Moisio. 81 min. K12.
★★★★
Social media dramaturgy is often difficult to grasp. Short videos, instant messages, comments, selfies, likes and live streams accumulate into a messy scene, the essence of which gets out of hand, spoils quickly, giggles and pants. When grafted into the film’s narrative, the social media element often feels contrived and clunky.
Anna-Maija Heinonen and Krista Moisio it doesn’t happen in the documentary. The film follows two young people struggling to grow up, Attea and Jonsua. The lives of both are colored by intoxicants and devotional mixing, changing groups of friends, homes and dating relationships, timid and unconditional affection with its pain.
You walk on the edge of a crime and fall over it headfirst. In the background, there is a muffled attempt by social services and parents to curb excesses. Everything is pierced, supported and controlled by social media.
A smartphone the camera records a pause. Followers’ hearts rain down on Snapchat live like crazy. The feeling of being constantly exposed incites young people to increasingly risky behavior, because the number of followers is earned with content.
Some’s rhythm makes everything feel shockingly fleeting and dense: there are no consequences. There is only an endless present, an endless inside joke and restless bliss measured by the number of viewers.
Some on the backbone of the documentary, which takes the viewer into the skin of young people. The creators’ realization has been to identify the viewer with its ragged addiction. Through Some, the film’s look at young people is not patronizing or educational, just intimate.
The immediacy, honesty and occasionally startlingly accurate analysis of their own world of the main characters of the documentary are told in detail.
The directors have been shooting the film for three years. The time span can be seen in the confidence of the young protagonists, which a successful follow-up documentary requires.
The camera can follow the main characters of the documentary up close.
Atte, 18, and Jonsu, 16, let the camera get close to them in everything. Many things are true at the same time. In Känn, rioting, fighting and messing up are trying out freedom, performing and showing off, but also a shameful attempt to perceive oneself with others.
In the end, Ate and Jonsu’s quite different stories draw boundaries for each other.
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Where have we gone wrong when young people have it even worse?
The directors say in the film’s press material that at first the young people were wary of them. At a house party, they had jokingly asked if you were from Sossus or Supo. Subtly, the film also tells about adults, whose tiredness, absence and artificiality surround the vagaries of young people.
The film, which is compact in length, focuses on the current social question of where we have gone wrong, when it is even worse for young people. The narrative does not offer an unequivocal answer. It doesn’t try to wash young people of their own responsibility, but it doesn’t moralize either. In the midst of harsh events, there is joy and tenderness.
Hard to Break is first and foremost a contemporary testimony: a small film whose topicality clings to the struggles of young people right now. The film has been supported by, among others, the A-klinikkasäätiö and Asema’s children. In describing the logic of social media, the documentary achieves mastery.
Script Anna-Maija Heinonen, Krista Moisio, photography Antti Savolainen, Krista Moisio, editing Mikko Sippola, composer Toni Teivaala.