{"id":258667,"date":"2025-09-27T11:55:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T11:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/258667\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T11:55:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T11:55:11","slug":"sense-and-sensibility-follows-an-unconventional-mother-daughter-duo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/258667\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Sense and Sensibility’ Follows an Unconventional Mother-Daughter Duo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFinnish filmmaker\u00a0Hanna Nordenswan<\/a> makes her feature documentary debut with \u201cSense and Sensibility,\u201d\u00a0which 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<\/a>, which ran Sept. 24 \u2013 26.<\/p>\n

\n\tProduced by Helsinki-based Zone2 Pictures, \u201cSense and Sensibility\u201d follows\u00a0a 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe two women, however, are polar opposites. Whereas Carita\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as time passes, Carita\u2019s retirement begins to loom, and a heart attack \u2014 coupled with Christa\u2019s increasing exhaustion from the demands of her job \u2014 changes their relationship to each other and towards the future. Faced with a newfound uncertainty, Christa must decide if she\u2019s ready to leave the safety of the cemetery and confront the world beyond its gates \u2014 and, perhaps more importantly, let that world inside.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking to\u00a0Variety\u00a0in Helsinki,\u00a0Nordenswan 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. \u201cI had just kept it open as a tab on my computer for two years,\u201d\u00a0the director\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

\n\tAn accomplished journalist who\u2019d directed a handful of documentary shorts, Nordenswan left Helsinki to attend a master\u2019s program at New York\u2019s School of Visual Arts, returning to Finland just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.\u00a0Like many others around that time, she said, she found herself preoccupied with thoughts of death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat, in turn, led her back to Christa and Carita, who spent their working lives cremating bodies, comforting mourners and performing other jobs around the cemetery \u2014 tasks they handled with grace and humor.\u00a0Nordenswan wondered if\u00a0\u201cmaybe they [would] be able to make me feel more comfortable with the idea of death.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce approached by the director, the women were hardly camera-shy. \u201cThey were like, \u2018Well, 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,\u2019\u201d Nordenswan said. \u201cI think they also acknowledged that their relationship is pretty special.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNordenswan began filming in 2022, and \u201cvery quickly, I realized that they have this super unique relationship,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re very funny characters. The death part became the background, more than the subject [of the film].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSense and Sensibility\u201d wowed the jury at Finnish Film Affair, who praised its \u201cclear vision\u201d and \u201cdeeply human yet extraordinary theme\u201d while presenting the story of a mother and daughter \u201cthat is highly relatable and could resonate across borders.\u201d The jury added that the film \u201cpromises to portray death as a natural part of life, leveraging a comedic tone at parts and strong stylistic choices from the director.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThough Nordenswan initially set out to make \u201cSense and Sensibility\u201d as a way to conquer her fears about dying, the filmmaking process hasn\u2019t entirely yielded the results she\u2019d hoped for. Yet she said it\u2019s been a gratifying journey nonetheless.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWorking on this film hasn\u2019t really\u00a0made me feel less scared about death the\u00a0way I had hoped, even though many of the processes surrounding it feel less scary now,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it has affected the way I think about my relationship to my mother. I think I\u2019ve learned something about trying to see the best in your mother or daughter, the way the protagonists in this film do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Finnish filmmaker\u00a0Hanna Nordenswan makes her feature documentary debut with \u201cSense and Sensibility,\u201d\u00a0which tells the story of the unique…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":258668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[13115,171,135878,135879,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-258667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-documentaries-to-watch","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-finnish-film-affair","11":"tag-hanna-nordenswan","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115276134801837268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}