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A short documentary about the Finnish fisherman, ornithologist, philosopher and deep ecologist Pentti Linkola (1932–2020). As the title indicates, the film focuses on Linkola’s everyday activities during one day on his primitive estate and its surroundings in Southern Finland, shot sometime near the end of the summer in 2018. Thus the film is probably the last extensive footage of Linkola before his death on in April 2020 (right at the start of the COVID pandemic) and one of the few showing his everyday life during the summer more in detail. Other documentary films about him have focused more on the fishing that he did for a living during the autumn and winter months, in the luddite way that he did most things (using only a rowboat and a horse-drawn sleigh when the lake froze down). The main title of the film, “The Dissident“, may be misleading to those unfamiliar with Linkola’s life and work, since his unconventional and sometimes radical views on humanity, society, nature preservation, etc. are not given much exposure here. Instead, Linkola speaks softly and quietly on the things closest to his heart, giving his observations on the surrounding nature and animals, most of all birds, which he spent a lifetime observing and documenting in a copious amount of notebooks, going back to the late 1940s. These ruminations are only occasionally interrupted by his cutting remarks about the excesses of modern society intruding into his way of life, whether in the form of high-volume jet fighters flying over his estate, communication with the outside world being cut off for one day because of a rally race (“one of the holiest things there is“, as he dryly remarks), or a pestering telephone with a will of its own. But of course Linkola’s entire way of life, which is lovingly, was an act of dissidence in the modern world.
