A plunge into the last months of Finland's WWII in all its tired gruesomeness. A fugue of dour, sad, doubt-ridden, sorrow-filled faces, confessions and oratorical detours, an in memoriam of a time and people gone by. A masterpiece of AV oral history. Finland won the Winter War, and fast. The Continuation War was something else: the fighting went on for more than three years (June '41 - September '44) and the nation was slowly bleeding dry; in the end, it took a political ruse to get Finland out of this mess. Even more than The Year 1939 (1993) and The Year 1952 (1980), The Last Summer 1944 is a work of collective remembrance - an oratory, really, a memorial mass for a time and people long gone. Von Bagh uses comparatively little archival material here - instead, with love and compassion, worry and scepticism, he gazes long and hard into the faces of elderly people trying to talk about those last months of tired drudgery: of time slowing down more and more until that standstill became capitulation. A monument to unknown oral history.
