Shipbuilder | movie | 1985 | Official Trailer - video Dailymotion

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This film recreates the true story of Tom Sukanen, an eccentric Finnish immigrant who homesteaded in Saskatchewan in the | dG1fOEVqdGNldFFSVnM

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 ]

Shipbuilder | movie | 1985 | Official Trailer

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