Finnish filmmaker Hanna Nordenswan makes her feature documentary debut with “Sense and Sensibility,” which tells the story of the unique relationship between a mother and daughter who both work at a cemetery. The project won the award for best documentary at Finnish Film Affair, which ran Sept. 24 – 26.
Produced by Helsinki-based Zone2 Pictures, “Sense and Sensibility” follows a recovering alcoholic who leans on her mother for support. Their relationship has become symbiotic, and their lives intertwined with the cemetery where both live in employee housing.
The two women, however, are polar opposites. Whereas Carita’s personality is charged with emotion, her daughter, Christa, depends on logic and rationality. Since becoming sober, she refuses to let people in. Instead, her life revolves around the cemetery, her mother and her rescue dogs.
But as time passes, Carita’s retirement begins to loom, and a heart attack — coupled with Christa’s increasing exhaustion from the demands of her job — changes their relationship to each other and towards the future. Faced with a newfound uncertainty, Christa must decide if she’s ready to leave the safety of the cemetery and confront the world beyond its gates — and, perhaps more importantly, let that world inside.
Speaking to Variety in Helsinki, Nordenswan recalled coming across an article about the quirky mother-daughter duo in the late-2010s, when a Finnish newspaper profiled the women and their unconventional family arrangement. “I had just kept it open as a tab on my computer for two years,” the director said.
An accomplished journalist who’d directed a handful of documentary shorts, Nordenswan left Helsinki to attend a master’s program at New York’s School of Visual Arts, returning to Finland just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Like many others around that time, she said, she found herself preoccupied with thoughts of death.
That, in turn, led her back to Christa and Carita, who spent their working lives cremating bodies, comforting mourners and digging graves — tasks they handled with grace and humor. Nordenswan wondered if “maybe they [would] be able to make me feel more comfortable with the idea of death.”
Once approached by the director, the women were hardly camera-shy. “They were like, ‘Well, we have been thinking that this would be a good reality show. Everything that happens here is so crazy, and people should know about it,’” Nordenswan said. “I think they also acknowledged that their relationship is pretty special.”
Nordenswan began filming in 2022, and “very quickly, I realized that they have this super unique relationship,” she said. “They’re very funny characters. The death part became the background, more than the subject [of the film].”
“Sense and Sensibility” wowed the jury at Finnish Film Affair, who praised its “clear vision” and “deeply human yet extraordinary theme” while presenting the story of a mother and daughter “that is highly relatable and could resonate across borders.” The jury added that the film “promises to portray death as a natural part of life, leveraging a comedic tone at parts and strong stylistic choices from the director.”
Though Nordenswan initially set out to make “Sense and Sensibility” as a way to conquer her fears about dying, the filmmaking process hasn’t entirely yielded the results she’d hoped for. Yet she said it’s been a gratifying journey nonetheless.
“Working on this film hasn’t really made me feel less scared about death the way I had hoped, even though many of the processes surrounding it feel less scary now,” she said. “But it has affected the way I think about my relationship to my mother. I think I’ve learned something about trying to see the best in your mother or daughter, the way the protagonists in this film do.”
