You won't often encounter a film whose opening credits are written in braille and read aloud by a text-to-speech voice. That's exactly how The Blind Man Who Didn't Want to See Titanic begins—the film, not James Cameron's. We watch Jaakko running, every morning, in his dreams. He can't run in real life; he has muscular dystrophy. Blind, in a wheelchair, Petri spends nearly all his days at home. On the phone with his friend Sirpa, whom he seems to love, he talks about his vast collection of films from when he could still see. The DVD of Titanic sits unwrapped in his apartment. He's never wanted to watch it.
Jaakko needs assistance often, but he fights to stay independent. So he decides to visit Sirpa on his own, without any helper. The romantic adventure takes a dark turn because Jaakko's faith in people isn't always rewarded—even in Finland (where, incidentally, train station elevators can break down too).
Director Teemu Nikki wrote this film specifically for his friend Petri Poikolainen, who shares the same condition as the character he plays: he is truly blind, he truly uses a wheelchair, yet he inhabits a fictional character written in a screenplay. He does it better than anyone else could, merging his lived experience with an actor's craft he was eager to demonstrate. The director's respect for his blindness shows in every frame: Nikki films Petri almost exclusively, mostly fixing on his face. Everything around him blurs or falls away. When Jaakko can't gather information about his surroundings, we don't either. We get only what sound tells us. In other words, since he cannot see what's around him, it would be wrong to grant us the privilege of observing the world he inhabits. Instead, we stay with him always, eyes on him. We cannot push him or help him. But Jaakko/Petri might prefer it this way: he wants an adventure like the ones in the films he remembers so well, and he never loses hope of completing his mission, even as it grows harder. The film won the Audience Award – Armani beauty in the new Orizzonti Extra section at the Venice Film Festival, given for the first time that year.