The Man Who Died

VIDEO · 2005

A short narrative video piece set in Finland about a janitor of a school who accidentally dies in the dead of winter, a fairly common story in this part of the world.

The setting for his video is a bridging college between high school and university in Finland where I had a residency in late 2005 after the birth of my first sun. Locals told me about how lone men in winter would sometimes get drunk and have an accident, sometimes fatal. I was told that this was a fate of the janiro of the school some years back. In winter when the school was vacated around Christmans time, he warmed himself a little too much with spirits, went for a walk, and disappeared. Banal? Tragic? Maybe poetic.