F. E. Sillanpä;ä;, Finland's Nobel laureate, was an imagist who relied more on descriptive word painting than on narrative to shape his pantheistic vision of man. The peasants of his melancholy meditation on Finnish summers are carried along by the cycle of the seasons, from birth to death, from love to loss. By celebrating the Nordic rituals of the summer solstice they offset winter's descent into darkness and remain in harmony with nature. Valentin Vaala's languorously paced images are among the most sensuous in Finnish cinema, and capture Sillanpä;ä;'s atmosphere of resistance and resignation, the douceur de la vie of old age. As the sun lingers well into the night, farmers till the soil, lovers meet in the fields, a baby is born, a man dies mysteriously, and we are left to speculate about their destinies. "As a landscape painter (Vaala) is unsurpassed, and when he extols the Finnish lakes and forests he places his finger on the pulse of his countrymen's yearning." (Peter Cowie) "Perhaps a masterpiece, with its some sixteen stories proceeding along the lines of Altman..." (Peter von Bagh)