This is the largest film production ever made in the Swedish language in Finland. Believe it or not, that title above is in English! The Swedish name is Stormskärs Maja. In Finnish it is Myrskyluodon Maija.
Film adaptation of Anni Blomqvist’s acclaimed 19th-century Åland epic about the life of the archipelago girl Maja out on the windswept Stormskäret. When the young Maja marries Janne, they settle out on the outer skerries to get close to rich fishing. The barren and unforgiving nature makes every day a struggle for survival, but also offers them a freedom where they themselves are allowed to shape their lives and their existence.
Let me clear up one ambiguity in that summary above. Anni Blomqvist is not a 19th century author. She is a 20th century author whose story takes place in the 19th century. The five books in the series were written in the 1960s and 1970s. By clearing that up, I don’t mean to imply that Anni Blomqvist was some suburban sybarite fantasizing about Maja’s rugged life. She was absolutely the real deal. Her own life was as hardscrabble as any lived by her characters. The daughter of a fisherman, she spent her entire life on the desolate Åland Islands, having been born there as the eldest of ten children in the years before electricity. Her husband and the children who lived to adulthood all drowned at sea.
Blomqvist modeled her characters on the era of her own grandparents, based upon extensive research, as well as tales from her own maternal grandmother. Her own life and those of her ancestors gave Blomqvist an amazing collection of stories to tell, so it’s not surprising that this is not the first time they have been adapted for the screen. Her Stormskerry pentalogy previously formed the basis for a popular Finnish TV series in the 1970s. What is even more amazing than the life she lived is the fact that she had the writing ability to share those stories with the world, because her formal education ended in the 4th grade. Anni Blomqvist was truly the epitome of a rural, working-class, self-educated author.
