One might think that fair-haired, well-muscled Nordic warriors and dark and slender Chinese swordsmen have little in common. Yet in Jade Warrior (Jadesoturi) Finnish film director Antti-Jussi Annila has constructed a cultural bridge between his homeland and China.

A Sino-European co-production – involving Finland, China, Holland and Estonia – the RMB 27.5 million film is based on The Kalevala, an epic 19th-century poem still influential in Finland to this day. “The heroes in The Kalevala are not typical heroes; no matter what they do they can never get the women they love,” says Annila.

Jade Warriors follows the travails of one hapless warrior (Tommi Eronen) as he fights to be reunited with his beloved Zhang Jingchu (Peacock). To achieve that aim, he travels across time and place, from ancient China to cold contemporary Finland. Along the way, the past feeds the story in the present day, and slowly reveals the warrior’s origin in China’s Iron Age, as well as his exceptional fighting skills. It’s an odd mix to be sure, but the 29-year-old filmmaker says the hybrid plot is not too far-fetched. Both The Kalevala, and China’s wuxia pian tradition of chivalrous marital arts’ spectacles, share a common theme: “melodramatic love stories of warriors, swords and sorcery”, explains the director.

Annila is both a student and fan of Hong Kong Tsui Hark and John Woo, both of whom are masters of the wuxia pian genre. Indeed, Annila says that his aim in making the film was to “find the source of the huge energy of those Hong Kong action films”.

That said, Jade Warriors promises to be more than your average kung fu flick; rather, it offers an exploration of the cultural connection between the two countries which extends back to the late 19th century. Those ties are perhaps best exemplified in a running motif in the film based on a Finnish artifact, sampo. In Finland, it is said to bring good fortune to the Nordic people, while its Chinese counterpart, sanfu, or sampo in Mongolian, means ‘the secret source of all happiness’.

The Finnish sampo concept then, which is central to The Kalevala, closely resembles the shamanistic cosmologies of Mongolia, and those of Tibet. The Kalevala has been translated into 54 languages, and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to learn Finnish so that he could read it in the original language. In light of the above, that Jade Warrior is the first ever Finnish kung fu film is really not so surprising; after all, the quest for happiness is universal.

(c) that's Shanghai Magazine
Chief editor: Steven Crane
October 2006 issue