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Shipbuilder | movie | 1985 | Official Trailer
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7/20/2023
This film recreates the true story of Tom Sukanen, an eccentric Finnish immigrant who homesteaded in Saskatchewan in the | dG1fOEVqdGNldFFSVnM
Category
🎥
Short film
Transcript
Display full video transcript
00:00
[ Music ]
00:13
>> Tom Sukkainen was an immigrant from Finland, like all of us on the farms
00:19
around Lucky Lake and Saskatchewan.
00:21
But he was different.
00:23
He had a dream.
00:25
He built a ship to sail home.
00:30
All through the '30s he'd been building it.
00:36
When I first started to notice him, I was just a little girl
00:39
and lived on the farm across the way.
00:43
He was obsessed with that ship and getting it back to Finland.
00:48
[ Music ]
00:53
I heard it had something to do with the wife
00:55
and baby he left behind in the old country.
00:59
[ Music ]
01:05
Nobody believed he could do it, but Tom just kept working.
01:10
[ Music ]
01:17
He pretty well gave up farming and everything else to do it.
01:22
[ Music ]
01:29
Never mind that his farm was 17 miles from the nearest water,
01:33
the South Saskatchewan River, he just kept at it for about 10 years.
01:39
First the hull, then the keel.
01:43
He was a real inventor too.
01:45
Built his own equipment, tools, even a camera and a water clock.
01:51
He was a genius.
01:55
He planned to haul the ship over land to the river with his horses
02:01
and float it down to Hudson's Bay and then to Finland.
02:05
[ Music ]
02:08
He had Sisu when other Finns had forgotten the spirit of bravery.
02:14
[ Music ]
02:21
And because they forgot, no one could help.
02:25
[ Music ]
02:39
The hull weighed around 20 tons.
02:43
It was like trying to shift a mountain.
02:47
[ Music ]
02:57
But he did move it.
02:59
On a good day they might make 20 yards.
03:03
That's when people stopped making a joke of it.
03:08
He headed for that river for more than two years.
03:13
One by one his horses died, but Tom kept going.
03:19
[ Music ]
03:24
When he could go no further, he just left the ship on the prairie
03:28
and went down to the river to start work on the boiler.
03:32
[ Music ]
03:41
He worked on that boiler only a mile from my father's farm.
03:46
By that time people started saying he was strange.
03:51
He was eating gophers and his dead horses.
03:55
[ Music ]
04:24
[ Background Sounds ]
04:27
[ Music ]
04:32
They said something had to be done.
04:36
He was starving and working himself to death.
04:40
[ Music ]
04:51
They came and took him away to the Battleford Asylum.
04:55
[ Music ]
04:57
That must have broken him.
05:00
[ Music ]
05:08
Within a year he was dead.
05:11
[ Music ]
05:17
But I know he never quit traveling on his journey
05:21
because his dream did carry him home to Suomi.
05:25
[ Music ]
05:54
[ Music ]
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