Lost in Shadowland

“Writing a script for a documentary is really important. It's never going to be like what you’ve written, but you can dream how it feels and looks and comes together. Write it well. For if something goes really badly wrong – like in our film – then you’ll know how to react. You’ll have something to lean on and see that: “OK, this part is missing and I need to get that material covered”, or something else. Without that script, you can easily get really lost.”

Otso Tiainen seems to have practised his advice well, already in his first feature. Shadowland was the highest-attended foreign-language documentary released in Finland in 2024. It won the 2025 Jussi Award for best sound design. It has played various film festivals, recently in international competition at Krakow and Nordic competition at Nordisk Panorama, Malmö. This week it’s heading for yet another competition, this time at the Torino Film Festival, and next month San Francisco IndieFest awaits the film. A deal with Norse Key Studios for international sales has just been locked in.

The film took eight years to complete, with three years of shooting, all by a “novice” director-producer duo setting out to follow an esoteric community of “seekers”, operating in the French Pyrenees, at one time the home of the Cathars, and, as per legend, the Holy Grail. One of them, a real Hollywood director, ignited the process on a 2015 Finland visit.

“He invited us to come and feel the vibe,” says Tiainen, at the time directing the music series Sami Yaffa – Sound Tracker(2014-18) for Yle.

In 2015, the South African-born cult filmmaker Richard Stanley was given a retrospective by the Helsinki Night Visions film festival. He was chiefly notorious for his dismissal from The Island of Dr. Moreau, starring Marlon Brando, but this programme went deeper. Even obscurities like The Secret Glory, Stanley’s 2001 documentary on SS officer Otto Rahn’s quest for the Holy Grail in the 1930s, was followed by a lively Q&A session with the celebrated Perttu Häkkinen, radio personality, musician and expert subculture scholar.

“Perttu and I were old friends, and he really connected with Richard, who invited us to France. We went, mainly as a holiday trip. Still, I couldn’t help packing my camera, just in case…”

Tiainen returned with intriguing material. “By far the most interesting were the interviews with some of these ‘seekers’. Most of them, I realised, had suffered some trauma, and had in effect taken refuge in this place to reinvent themselves. It certainly applied to Richard, as a Hollywood persona non grata after Moreau.”

“What interested me more than Richard was the others around him, who were fascinating in their own right. Telling the story of the seekers as a group would put all of them, including Richard, on an equal level. All that would of course change when he suddenly got his Hollywood comeback in the middle of the shoot.”

As this exciting seed started budding, tragedy struck in 2018, when Häkkinen, a key co-creator, lost his life in a bicycle accident. After they had gotten over the worst shock, renowned film critic Kalle Kinnunen was brought in. As a close friend of the group, and well acquainted with the Finnish film environment, he proved an apt choice.

“My first concrete task was to call the most likely Finnish production company, to actually get what we were trying to do,” Kinnunen remembers.

The company was Bufo, whose roster includes names like Eskil Vogt, Tarik Saleh and Aki Kaurismäki. Kinnunen still thought they could use something like Shadowland.

“Despite their art house status, I know that Mark Lwoff, one of the founders, is into genre cinema. And I was right, they were with us.”

Kinnunen, who would eventually gain sole producer credit, also got private investors on board, including Sam Lake from Remedy Entertainment, who proved especially reliable along the bumpy road.

With production now in place, some big news announced itself in 2019 – Richard Stanley was about to direct his first Hollywood film in 25 years.

“Everything changed when he started filming Color Out of Space,” says Tiainen. “We were now making a happy film about the underdog eccentric artist who lost everything, who went to this place to find himself – and it worked! Our own ‘Sugarman’, kind of!”

“We got support from The Finnish Film Foundation and AVEK and a pre-buy from Yle – just like magic,” says Kinnunen. “We had talks with an American sales company. We had a budget, and Peter Flinckenberg, who shoots series like Westworld and Dune in the US, as cinematographer.”

Even Covid worked in their favour.

“Most, if not all, was in place. When it hit, we just got more time to fine-tune. These were still happy times.”

The next change came in March, 2021.

“We were going to film the 777th anniversary ceremony of the massacre of the Cathars at the Château de Montségur,” Tiainen says. “Big thing.”

“We were very energetic,” says Kinnunen. “Peter got amazing footage. The next morning we had a well-deserved sleep-in.”

That same morning in the US, a former partner of Stanley’s had filed charges for domestic violence against her ex, which would lead to a court case and a “renewed” Hollywood blacklist for Stanley.

“The phone rang, from one of our private backers, who backed out of the project,” remembers Tiainen. “Meanwhile, Twitter went crazy. Later that same day, our photographer tested Covid positive.”

“Then we thought: ‘Wonder what Richard’s doing?’ We asked him. He was willing to talk, to the camera. We formed an improvised crew and shot for two days.”

Eventually – and miraculously – Shadowland came safely ashore. It follows the court hearings, meets up with Stanley’s ex-partner, stays on in France, and captures the aftermath among the people of the community – the film’s real story, they both realised.

“It’s what we set out to depict. They’re in this region, this world, this mindset of the community. They’re there to build new identities within this spiritual life.”

“So in the end, it all went back to the original idea,” concludes Tiainen – who had the original script with him all along.