Tallinn Doc Film ‘Fruitcakes: Dawn of Drag’ on Finnish ‘Happy Gays’

Happy Gays. That was the name of Finland’s first drag show in the late 1970s, which drew big, loud and proud audiences. Among the people on stage back then were Mummo, one of the first openly gay men in the country, and his best friend Jolanda. Now, you can relive, or experience for the first time, some of the excitement of those days in the new documentary Fruitcakes: Dawn of Drag, which will celebrate its world premiere during the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia.

But it isn’t all about fun and panache. After all, not everyone was happy to hear about the now-legendary drag show and its performers’ joy back in the day. And when the AIDS crisis hit, fear and violence were among the responses. In 1988, Mummo was killed in his home in Helsinki.

Finnish filmmaker Vesa Kuosmanen (Just Animals) has a view of that building from a window in his apartment. Amid the more recent backlash against queer rights, he started thinking about making a film about that not-so-distant past.

He met the aforementioned Jolanda, a retired archivist. More than 30 years after his friend’s death, Jolanda opened up his own archive for Fruitcakes: Dawn of Drag. And the filmmaker and Jolanda invited a new generation of drag artists to bring Happy Gays back to the stage. The heartwarming film takes us on a ride through archive and new footage and rehearsals and re-enactments of Happy Gays that bring up happy but also painful memories, along with a different side of the at times curmudgeonly Jolanda. And it puts a spotlight on drag’s power to bring people together, to celebrate and to endure discrimination.

Kuosmanen also wrote the film and edited it together with Jussi Sandhu, with cinematography courtesy of Mikko Kelloniemi. Rise and Shine has boarded the film and is handling world sales. “Fruitcakes is much more than only a very entertaining trip down memory lane of drag culture in the 1980s,” says Rise and Shine’s Anja Dziersk. “It is a masterpiece of Finnish humor, connected to a very timely message as we see queer life being challenged and threatened every day.”

THR can premiere a colorful and music-driven trailer for the film right here. Put your dancing shoes on!

Ahead of the Saturday world premiere of Fruitcakes: Dawn of Drag in Tallinn’s Doc@PÖFF International Competition program, THR talked to Kuosmanen about how the film came about, the early days of Finnish drag, mixing sorrow and joy, and why the doc’s title is about “reclaiming history” and language.

The filmmaker says a key inspiration for the film came a few years ago when the ice hockey-obsessed Finland won the world championship in the sport. “We rarely have such collective joy,” he says. “I’m not a big fan of ice hockey at all, but I think it’s lovely that people come out into the streets and celebrate. But then I heard that my friends were beaten up by ice hockey fans just because they look different.” And there were news stories about violence against people in the trans community.

Kuosmanen started thinking about what causes such anger. “My conclusion was it’s fear,” he tells THR. “It’s a fear of difference. So, I had this political motive for [exploring] how fear creates anger. And in our time of social media, we talk about how the algorithm pushes anger forward, and I think that’s completely true. But the real problem is actually fear. That there’s so much fear created, and we respond to fear through anger. So, I wanted to find out more about the story of Mummo’s murder.”

Finding people who remembered that time and were willing to discuss it proved difficult. “It almost felt like it was a forgotten history of Finland,” the filmmaker shares.

Then he was introduced to Jolanda, 70, who “kept all the archives and every single newspaper clip – basically everything,” the director tells THR. “So I went to meet him, but he was the most unlikely documentary protagonist ever because he really didn’t want to be in the film and was really crumpy, with a cynical sense of humor. He also refuses to use the pronouns she/her. But I kept going to his place to scan documents and chat, and we became friends fairly quickly.”

Jolanda’s personality also fit the director’s interest in authenticity. “I personally dislike the righteous heroes who are staring from the window and are doing the right thing all the time,” Kuosmanen tells THR. “He’s this pioneer who has done great things but is a flawed human being. I didn’t want to make a film from my point of view [a la], ‘Look at these heroes.’ I wanted to show them as the more complex human [beings that they are].”

Complex was also the process of putting together visuals for the film. After all, Jolanda is so proud of the Happy Gay show, but beyond some footage that the filmmaker found in the archives of the Finnish public broadcaster, there wasn’t enough video material, which led the creative team to the idea of a reenactment of the legendary show.

“That gave me the form of the film, which happened fairly organically,” Kuosmanen recalls. “I started with this political motive, then I found this amazing character, and then we started pairing the young, woke drag artists with the older generation.”

What he found, and what audiences will see in Fruitcakes, is that the drag pioneers and the younger generation differ in their focus and way of expressing themselves. “The older people have a more honest attitude to life, in a way, while it feels that the younger generation is so polished and has thought everything through,” Kuosmanen tells THR. “So we started creating more situations where we could film them together, because the meeting point of generations became a key part of the film. These interactions really talked to me and touched my heart. So, it went from a very political [approach], became a more personal and character-driven piece, and then we added this more conceptual, cross- generational thing.”

Fruitcakes shows Jolanda missing Mummo but doesn’t go into much depth on the latter’s murder. “That was really important for me because I think that when you portray queer violence, in a way it creates more violence,” the Finnish filmmaker tells THR. “There have been so many films where queer people get killed. So I really wanted to be careful that it would not be one of those.”

The emotional core of the film combines “the long-lasting impact of sorrow and pain that Lolanda feels” and smiles, dancing and joy, Kuosmanen highlights. “For me, it’s all about celebration amidst the most horrible things happening,” he tells THR. “I think it’s super important that we don’t close our eyes to the world, but we need to embrace the whole cosmos of life, and that includes having parties, having a good time, going out to bars, kissing people. We must be able to have agency. And we shouldn’t forget joy.”

So, how did the filmmaker choose the title of his doc? “It’s difficult to find names that don’t sound too pretentious, so I think it’s good to have a little bit of a wink” in the title, Kuosmanen shares. “I feel that the title is much more like the original Happy Gays. For me, it’s about reclaiming history, reclaiming something. ‘Queer’ used to be a word you weren’t supposed to use, and now we are calling ourselves ‘queer.’ So, it’s really about reclaiming history in the sense that it’s us who define what we can be called and what language we use. And I love the playfulness of it.”