What Is Community?

In the universe of Erkka Nissinen, a midlife crisis is like being stuck in a deep, deep well. Sitting on the bottom, the 40-year-old protagonist reflects on his life. He thinks he should do something to benefit the community and quickly arrives at the conclusion that he should make a video on the subject of community. What follows is reality TV of the most absurd kind. Citizens are depicted as filler for the suburbs and sexual aberrations are seen as the norm. And if there's not enough action, just hire an actor to make an assassination attempt on you. The drawings in this stop-motion film are particularly effective in giving away a world in which fact and fiction merge. But the biggest attraction is Nissinen's voice-over. He dishes up the most incredible oddities in clipped but at times exaggeratedly formal English. The result is hilarious, but also pretty critical. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)