Anna-Liisa, the daughter of a well-to-do farm-owner, is engaged to be married to a wealthy young neighbor, Johannes. She is admired for her upright and decorous nature, but she carries a dark and melancholy secret that once drove her to the brink of suicide. The secret is known to old Husso, the mother of Mikko, formerly a farmhand on Anna-Liisa’s father’s farm. Mikko has made a lot of money as a log-rolling boss and now returns to claim Anna-Liisa as his bride. She does not want him, but she is caught in a bind by Mikko and Husso’s threat to expose her dreadful secret: that she became pregnant by Mikko and in desperation killed her newborn child.
Even today, making an infanticide the heroine of a story seems incredibly bold. The film was based on the 1895 play Anna-Liisa, written by Minna Canth (1844-1897). Canth was a pioneer of realism on the Finnish stage and a committed participant in the debates on the social position of women and the institution of marriage that raged across the Nordic countries in the 1880s and 1890s. Her strong stance against the oppression of women and the poor made her work controversial, but when the film was made, Canth was recognized as the most popular and prolific Finnish-language dramatist. Adapting one of her plays was therefore a logical choice for a film company wanting to make a Swedish-style national film based on a distinguished literary work. The final result was a success; Anna-Liisa even became the first Finnish film to be exported (it premiered in Stockholm in September 1922).
The stage play is quite compact, with all three acts using the same set: everything happens in the main room of Anna-Liisa’s father’s farm. The film effectively opens up the play, moving quite a bit of the action outside and adding little vignettes of Finnish rural life, including a shot of Johannes emerging from a sauna and a scene of Mikko among his fellow log-rollers, visualizing an important type in Finnish films, the virile but sometimes loutish lumberjack. The film also uses flashbacks to fill in the backstory, including gorgeous images of Anna-Liisa’s summer-night tryst with Mikko. All these exterior shots help to give the film a rural pictorial atmosphere which resembles some of the best Swedish achievements of the period. It should however be pointed out that Mikko’s profession as a lumberjack was also an element of the stage play, so this detail is therefore not an addition inspired by Mauritz Stiller’s Sången om den eldröda blomman (Song of the Scarlet Flower, 1919), even if that film was especially influential for Finnish film production.
Teuvo Puro (1884-1956) was one of the makers of the first Finnish fiction film, Salaviinanpolttajat (The Moonshiners , 1907), in which Jussi Snellman (1879-1969) played the lead. Puro and Snellman were both actors with the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki, and the leads of Anna-Liisa, Lindelöf, Autere, and Rinne, also came from there. In 1919, Puro was one of the co-founders of Suomi-Filmi, one of Finland’s two leading film companies during the studio era. Puro went on to make several important silent films, including Meren kasvojen edessä (Before the Face of the Sea, 1926) and Noidan kirot (The Curse of the Witch, 1927).
The print A new digital restoration based on a duplicate positive was carried out by KAVI (The National Audiovisual Institute, Helsinki) in 2013. The material was scanned at 2K but because of frame-line issues in the first-generation material the image had to be scanned twice; the best alternative was selected scene-by-scene. The restoration was conducted using DaVinci Revival and PFClean software programmes. Almost all scenes have been stabilized, and flicker, dirt, scratches, tears, splices, and all manner of patina have been removed when possible. Contrast has been corrected, and colour has been added according to original models using DaVinci Resolve software; the DCP has a colour solution similar to tinting.

Magnus Rosborn, Casper Tybjerg