Finland's first film was lost on its way into history

The Moonshiners - The Movie

Finland’s first feature film was not a national romantic masterpiece, but a short silent farce about moonshiners. Salaviinanpolttajat premiered in Helsinki in 1907 and was directed by Louis Sparre and Teuvo Puro. The film can no longer be seen, as all the footage has been destroyed. Nor has the original screenplay survived.

The story of the lost film takes a turn that is almost too cinematic to be true. Finland did not yet have its own film lab, so the film had to be sent to Germany to be developed and duplicated. Part of the material was destroyed during the journey when the ship carrying the films sank off the German coast. The film was eventually completed, but not quite as it was intended.

Later, all traces of it disappeared. In 1946, Teuvo Puro said he had tried to find a copy of the film. According to him, the negative had been in storage for a while, but it had been lost during a move. The last strange clue came from singer Helge Lindberg, who had said he had seen the film in a theater somewhere in Italy. That is where the trail ends.

*The Moonshiners* is therefore a peculiar starting point in Finnish film history: the first domestic fiction film of which little remains other than news reports, oral accounts, and the shadow of a lost print. If the film were ever to be found, it would be one of the most significant archival discoveries in Finnish cultural history