Everybody in the rival lands of Kalevala and Pohjola wants the sampo – a magical mill that can be set to put out grain, or salt, or gold. But to make it, one requires a series of magical ingredients. Louhi (Anna Orochko), the wicked witch of the North, thinks she has all the gubbins, but still requires the skill of the master-smith Ilmarinen (Ivan Voronov). In order to lure Ilmarinen to her lair, Louhi kidnaps Ilmarinen’s sister Annikki (Eve Kivi), locking her beneath “a hill of copper”. Ilmarinen and Annikki’s would-be husband Lemminkäinen (Andris Osins), take the advice of the bard-wizard Väinämoinen (Urho Somersalmi), and build a magic boat to get them to the north.

Louhi, however, has a bunch of tasks for them to fulfil, including ploughing a field full of vipers, and forging a sampo for her, before she is prepared to release Annikki. Realising that Louhi intends to monopolise the sampo’s bounty for herself, Lemminkäinen returns to the north to steal it back, returning with a small piece that sort of works.

The angry Louhi gatecrashes the wedding of Lemminkäinen and Annikki to steal the sun itself from Kalevala, locking it back in her mountain fortress. Ilmarinen starts work on a new sun (he’s a sort of mythical MacGuyver), but Väinämoinen argues that the coming battle will be fought not with swords, but with songs, demanding that Ilmarinen knock him up a magic kantele to win the culture wars.

In the final confrontation, Väinämoinen’s song puts Louhi’s troll army to sleep, and Louhi herself is eventually turned to stone. Lemminkäinen smashes open the mountain fortress, and frees the sun to shine down on Finland for, well, at least a couple of months a year, it turns out.

This real-time blog of Finnish film history shouldn’t get around to Alexandr Ptushko’s 1959 epic for several years. But it screened on Finnish television on Kalevala Day in February 2024, leading two readers of this blog to immediately complain that I hadn’t covered it. I was mainly shocked that this blog had two whole readers, but immediately put it next on the watch-list, greatly aided by the fact that the Elonet website not only had the film in its entirety, but a set of built-in English subtitles.

I say I saw the film, but I saw a version of it. Sampo was shot in four different editions, Finnish and Russian, standard and anamorphic. It also exists in a hacked-up American edit called The Day the Earth Froze, about which the less said the better.

The most fantastic, goose-bumpy moment in this fantasy film begins with the opening credits, as Suomi-Filmi, the long-standing Finnish film company, shares the title logo with the Soviet Union’s Mosfilms. This international co-production is an amazing sight to see, considering the Finnish film industry’s long-standing antipathy for all things Russian. Now, we have Lenin’s real-life god-daughter, Anna Orochko, done up like Bob Hope in drag to play the baddy, facing up against a scattering of actors from Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries (two Lithuanians and an Estonian), along with the lone Finn, Urho Somersalmi, from Those Golden Days of Yore.

There had been multiple discussions of the possibility of a film based on Elias Lönnröt’s epic poem, but the decision to embark upon this fragment as an international co-production began life in earnest in 1956, when a Finnish film week in Moscow put producers from both countries in the same room with enough vodka to make the Cold War go away. Shooting on location in Finnish beauty spots began in 1957, before production moved to the Soviet Union for the studio work. A few Soviet locations do sneak in, and would strike a discordant note with critics who were thrilling to the sight of Finnish legend in its natural habitat, and didn’t like the occasional interpolation of Ukrainian scenery (a similar fudge rather ruined The House of Flying Daggers for me).

But it was misleading to get too excited about the sight of Finnish myth “re-enacted” in Punkaharju, Kemijärvi and Kuusamo when much of Lönnröt’s material was collected on what is now the other side of the border, in what is now Russian Karelia. This, of course, was why the Soviets were so enthusiastic about making this movie in the first place, because while the Finns were braying about their epic “Finnish” movie, the Soviet press was lauding it as a celebration of “Russian” legend. One of the authentic Finnish locations was, for example, Petrozavodsk, which was only Finnish for a brief time in the Continuation War, before the Russians snatched it back. It was a town in what was then the Soviet Republic of Karelia, where Finnish remained a recognised language up until the 1980s.

For the Finnish press, the film was probably more exciting in prospect than on release. While it was underway, with a budget multiple times higher than the average Finnish movie of the day, with a film crew cropping up all around Finland, there was much to speculate about. When it finally arrived, many critics were underwhelmed by the po-faced, ciphered nature of the characters, most of whom were just clothes horses to hang some speeches on. To be fair, as Heikki Eteläpäa conceded in the Ilta Sanomat, that was really a failing of the original poems, and not really something that could be blamed on the movie.

Lönnröt’s original is also to blame for the haphazard storytelling, which, as noted by Ilkka Juonala in Aamulehti, resulted in a film that “seemed to end at one point, only to start again from the beginning.” And indeed, it’s basically all done in the first 60 minutes, only for Louhi’s return to steal the sun to kick it all off again.

For the Finnish critics, and indeed for audiences today, the lingering appeal of Sampo lies in occasional glimpses of fantasy coming to life. Annikki interrogates literal wind-bags, chained in the fortress where Louhi has stolen the spirits of the various breezes. Lemminkäinen’s mother nonchalantly walks on water as she searches for her son by the side of a lake. Louhi’s cloak flies with its own power, transforming into the sail that drags Annikki’s boat away to captivity. Ilmarinen forges a red horse that will help him and Lemminkäinen plough a field of vipers. Every now and then, there is a moment, a costume, a tableau that recalls the paintings of Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and repeatedly, the characters squabble and bicker before a real Finnish landscape, as alive with lakes and trees as the Kalevala itself, and no less magical.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.