Armotonta menoa – Hoivatyön lauluja / Ruthless Times – Songs of Care

Human beings can only assert themselves through communal song. The camera pans elegiacally across the tableau vivant of the exhausted faces of care workers. "We are dead tired", they sing in chorus. The old people fall in, stoic and dispassionate: "A dignified death is too expensive". Welcome to the brave new world of privatisation and the digital revolution – still sold as "smart" – which streamlines life, work, dying, and death in equal measure into manageable data, free of any and all corporeality or individual suffering. That template has taken over the Finnish elder care system, although the robot roaming the corridors of the retirement home seems more to embody infantilisation than progress. Profit maximisation and efficiency, for the satisfaction of faceless shareholders and investors, set the pace. A world in which humanity slips more and more out of focus, and in which caretakers like Tiina, who has decried its shortcomings for years, doubt the system but nevertheless trudge indefatigably onwards.