Aarne Juutilainen a.k.a. The Terror of Morocco: Documentary Film about a Finnish Warrior (2024)
Aarne Juutilainen (1904 - 1976), also known as “The Terror of Morocco”, became a familiar figure to me when in 2018-23 I made a drama documentary about his life and times, the film which was based on a stage monologue written by Seppo Porvali (1950 – 2019). I supplemented this original monologue text with other biographical material about Juutilainen.
Based on my own worldview, I had not previously considered myself the actual target audience for any war histories, but the more I read about and studied the life of Aarne Juutilainen, the more I began to be fascinated by the character's sudden contradictions and the very ingredients that legends and myths are made of. Whether they had anything to do with reality or not.
In recent years, the figure who has interested the general public the most from the Battle of Kollaa (1939-40) has been the sniper Simo Häyhä (1905 - 2002), a.k.a. "White Death", who served in the 6th Company of Infantry Regiment 34 where Aarne Juutilainen was the commanding officer. Books, articles and online videos have been published about Häyhä, not only in Finland but also elsewhere in the world. At least one film project about Simo Häyhä is now in the works. In these, Häyhä's superior Aarne Juutilainen has inevitably remained a supporting character, usually appearing only briefly. Whether the stories about Simo Häyhä will also arouse new interest in the figure of The Terror of Morocco remains to be seen.
When making the documentary, I used as sources several books and newspaper and online articles about Aarne Juutilainen himself, the Battle of Kollaa and the Winter War in general. In addition, I searched for information on the Internet, where I also found archived old Finnish newspapers and magazines from the early 20th century. These yielded loose but important pieces of information, such as the Sortavala White Guard's Idän Vartio (“Guard of the East”) magazine, old issues of which from the turn of the 1910s and 1920s can be browsed through the Finna service. There I also found some interesting information about young Aarne Juutilainen's service (such as that Juutilainen received a demotion in the Guard due to "inappropriate behaviour") that, in my opinion, had not been covered at all in the literature and articles on The Terror of Morocco to date.
During the development of the documentary, there was much thought given to whether, in addition to the character of Juutilainen, the historical background in Finland should also be discussed, against which the figure of The Terror of Morocco and his actions might be easier to understand. For example, exploring the ideas of masculinity through the character of The Terror of Morocco was also one of the ideas considered during the draft stage. In the end, it was decided to focus only on Aarne Juutilainen in the documentary and leave out any consideration of any wider historical background and context, though for my own research I compiled a sort of essay featuring a sort of history of ideologies during Juutilainen’s life and before and after (which can be found from the Finnish version of this text).
The origins of the stage monologue
In the stage monologue, which was filmed for the documentary at Ykspihlaja in Kokkola, the main role was played by actor Pauli Poranen (born 1958). At the time, he worked as an acting teacher at the Voionmaa Institute, where I studied filmmaking. The documentary film was created on Poranen's initiative, and I myself was involved in its creative team from the very beginning as a scriptwriter, editor and director of the documentary material. The second director credited in the final documentary is Kimmo Lavaste, who directed the original stage monologue used in the film.
The one-man play “Terror of Morocco: The Monologue of a Finnish Warrior" had premiered at the Espoo City Theatre in November 2002.
The monologue had its origins when actor Pauli Poranen was training boxing at Harri Piitulainen's gym in Lönnrotinkatu of Helsinki for a TV production, when journalist Seppo Porvali arrived. Porvali recognised Poranen from the role of Corporal Lehto in Rauni Mollberg's 1985 film adaptation of Väinö Linna’s famed war novel Unknown Soldier. Seppo Porvali himself dreamed of a film that would tell the story of Lieutenant Colonel Ahti Vuorensola (1918 - 1994), who was awarded with the Mannerheim Cross. Poranen also knew Vuorensola, who had worked as a military expert in Mollberg's film. The process started, in which Ahti Vuorensola was the original protagonist of the planned film screenplay. The project did not receive funding.
The secondary character of this film script was the Terror of Morocco, Aarne Juutilainen. Poranen suggested that the main character be changed to the Terror of Morocco. Porvali agreed, but this movie screenplay did not receive financial support from the Finnish Film Foundation, either.
Now Poranen asked Seppo Porvali to write a stage monologue about the life of Terror of Morocco. Porvali wrote the one-man play “Terror of Morocco: The Monologue of a Finnish Warrior” in merely two months. As Pauli Poranen toured around the country performing, the ordinary Finnish audiences adopted the Terror of Morocco as their own.
The birth of the documentary
All I can say about the documentary itself is that it was made through trial and error. In total, the project was in the works from late 2018 to March 2024, when the documentary was finally released. Sometimes the project was on hold for a long time, for example due to the Covid pandemic. At one point, a couple of other people were also responsible for directing. In the end, I was the only one left from the original team of students. In addition to people, all kinds of ideas were also thrown around again, i.e. what the documentary should include in addition to the actual stage monologue, and some of these ideas were also filmed.
In March 2022, we filmed some exterior shots in Teisko, Tampere (where the snowy landscape of the logging area was used to represent the Kollaa front), in which the role of The Terror of Morocco was played by Joni Sydänlammi, a familiar face from the Voionmaa Institute’s Actors Department, who was involved in my short film The Stage Whisperer and the miniseries Resilient Heart, where I was the second screenwriter.
At this stage, we were playing around with the idea that in addition to Pauli Poranen's "Old" Terror of Morocco, the drama documentary would also include the "Young Juutilainen" played by Sydänlammi. He presented a few excerpts from the authentic exploits and escapades of Aarne Juutilainen which had been written down by such people as Erkki Palolampi, the author of the book Kollaa kestää, Helge Blomqvist, who met The Terror of Morocco in the Winter War, and the famed author Mika Waltari himself, who, as a journalist, went to interview Aarne Juutilainen on the Kollaa front.
However, the fragments did not make it into the final documentary, as I was commented that the lines from The Terror of Morocco should have been in the Karelian dialect, as in the original stage monologue, and not in the literary Finnish language in which they were written down in the original texts. However, the part of the Young Juutilainen by Sydänlammi made it into the first teaser of the documentary, which has already collected over 10,000 views on YouTube.
In the end, though, some of these filmed fragments were used in the final documentary as the “B-roll” footage, also in the opening credits, which show Juutilainen's ghostly figure wandering in the snowy landscape.
Now I guess you could say that when we were doing the documentary there was not a very clear vision of the whole thing at all. Especially meaning that other material outside of the actual stage monologue.
In retrospect, one can also say that some kind of firm grip of the producer to the project (and its screenplay) should have been taken from the beginning, but apparently within the framework of our own educational institution, where they also do a lot of other projects with students and there is also a constant stream of different administrative twists and turns, this was challenging.
So instead of looking for the guilty, you can say that everyone just had too many other things on their plate that took attention away from the project. And I was often a little out of touch with my own role in the whole. There also often seemed to be a lack of communication between myself and the people in our school's Audiovisual Department. All of this probably manifested itself in the raw material itself, a lot of which was ultimately left out of the final documentary. So, it can be argued that The Terror of Morocco might not have been completed without the The Federation of Education in Central Ostrobothnia (Kpedu) and the related Media Center Lime coming on board in early 2023. But the documentary was completed nonetheless. In the spirit of the Winter War, because despite the difficulties, we did not give up.
The actual premiere took place in July 2023 at Ykspihlaja’s Café Saha in Kokkola. A 100-minute raw version of the film was shown there, with the sound editing also still uncompleted. Hannu Björkbacka wrote a review of this version for the local newspaper Keskipohjanmaa under the title Marokon kauhun synnit ja syntiset (“The Sins and Sinners of The Terror of Morocco”). The following autumn, I edited the final 52-minute version of the film under the consultation of Kpedu's Markku Riipi.
Drama documentary The Terror of Morocco - Documentary Film about a Finnish Warrior was finally released online by VL Media in March 2024. Hannu Björkbacka now published a new review in Keskipohjanmaa:
A docudrama. That is probably what we should call The Terror of Morocco, directed and written by Erkki Rautio. It uses a huge amount of factual material, but takes as its central driving force the already twenty-year stage bravura of actor Pauli Poranen, the monologue of Captain Aarne Juutilainen.
The end result is striking. There is no getting away from the fact that the story is being told. Poranen's lush role forms the essence of the film. The veteran's charismatic appearance and voice bring the legend and the man to life from the pages of history.
Juutilainen (1904-1976), or The Terror of Morocco, was a soldier who served in three Finnish wars and, as his nickname suggests, in the Foreign Legion. He was wounded three times and was one of the key officers thanks to whom "Kollaa held" in the Winter War. Juutilainen has earned his documentary. Especially in these times!
The Terror of Morocco is largely a production from Kokkola. The creators presented an unfinished, longer version of the documentary at Ykspihlaja last summer. Now the loose ends have been cut and the extras trimmed to a solid 50 minutes. The work bears fruit.
History of ideologies
Wars do not happen in isolation from the rest of the world. If you want to understand them, you also have to understand the era in which they took place and the entire spiritual atmosphere in which people lived. Wars are usually about various nationalistic aspirations, questions of honour, the desire for expansion or self-protection, and economic goals. After wars, people ask themselves whether there was any point in the whole thing and whether it would be possible to live in a different way in the future. The reconstruction period is also spiritual. A wave of pacifism follows wars. Until the cycle begins again.
Aarne Juutilainen is still largely a mystery. Although the outlines of his military career are known, there is much in his life that has remained obscure. Various stories and rumours about Aarne Juutilainen's life are certainly circulating – you only have to browse various online forums to find them – but how clever it is to repeat those rumours in the text is a different matter.
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