The Rootless: Cultural Memory, Inheritance, and the Language of Nature

The Rootless: Inheriting What We Can No Longer Speak

I recently attended the Jean Rouch International Film Festival at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac here in Paris. Among the films I saw, one in particular has lingered: Juurettomat, a poetic short film by Finnish filmmaker August Joensalo.

The film, whose English title is The Rootless, is a meditation on cultural loss, ancestral memory, and the quiet rituals that bind us to something deeper than language. It stayed with me powerfully after I left the cinema—and not only for its artistry, but for the thoughts it inspired in me about identity, inheritance, and the spaces we return to when words are no longer enough.

Speaking Without a Shared Language

Joensalo weaves their own lyrical footage together with home videos captured decades earlier by their grandfather, who, it turns out, was also a hobbyist filmmaker. Their family is Karelian—a cultural group native to a border region long contested by Finland and Russia. Over time, Karelians were "integrated" into Finnish society, though the reality was more often one of assimilation.

Joensalo's grandfather is the last in their family to speak Karelian. As a child, he was bullied for his heritage. The language was lost, or at least silenced. And yet, across time, grandparent and grandchild remain in conversation—through cinema.

They don't speak the same words, but, both of them being skilled and artistic film-makers, they speak the same medium. And through this medium, The Rootless creates a dialog across generations where something essential is exchanged.

A Language of Roots and Loss

One of the most touching sequences in the film follows the grandfather as he picks mushrooms in the forest. As it does in English, the French title, Les Déracinés, evokes uprootedness—disconnection, loss. But in Finnish, the expression used to describe mushroom picking is entirely different: it translates more closely to "going into the mushrooms."

This shift in metaphor matters. One imagines something removed from the ground. The other imagines an immersion—an act of moving inward, of being surrounded and held by the forest. These subtle differences reveal how our mother tongues shape our perceptions—not just of language, but of life.

It made me wonder: what quiet metaphors do I carry in my own body, unspoken but lived? What have I inherited, even without having the words for it?

Nature as Memory, Forest as Witness

The forests of Finland play a powerful role in this film—not as backdrop, but as presence. Finland is one of the few places in the world where old-growth forests still exist. Walking through them, you can feel it. Something in the landscape invites you to slow down, to become still, to listen with your body.

Since leaving the suburbs of Sydney in my youth, I've lived my entire life in dense cities, where its the presence of human creation that defines my environment. When I visited Finland last year for the first time, I felt something that had been long-dormant inside of me recalibrate. 

People from Finland see connection to nature not as a luxury, but as a right. Wild camping, foraging, fishing—these are not pastimes, but essential expressions of what it means to be human. That sense of quiet immersion—the same feeling that Joensalo captures in the act of mushroom picking—felt profoundly familiar to me. Going into nature, into a different state of being.

As a therapist, I think often about what grounds people. And sometimes, the answer is not in a concept or a narrative, but in the forest floor beneath your feet.

Reflections for the Rootless: A Therapeutic Invitation

Whether you're navigating the loss of cultural heritage, a sense of disconnection, or the longing to feel more grounded, The Rootless offers more than a story—it offers a mirror. Below are two reflection sets you can use on your own or in your journaling practice.

1. Mapping the Inheritance

1. What identities or cultural stories have shaped your life—by presence or by absence?

2. Are there languages, rituals, or traditions that feel lost to you? How do you relate to that loss?

3. What "non-verbal languages" (creative, emotional, ancestral) do you use to stay connected?

Family Metaphor Mapping:

Choose a metaphor to represent your family or cultural story—a tree, a knot, a river, a mirror. Write a paragraph or draw what that metaphor reveals. Let the image speak, even if it doesn't make immediate sense.

2. Returning to the Forest (Even Without One Nearby)

1. Where in your life do you feel grounded? Where do you feel uprooted?

2. What does nature mean to you—not in theory, but in your body?

3. How would your life change if connection to land were a basic right?

"Into the Mushrooms" Walk

Find a small green space (a park, a street with trees, even a patch of grass). Walk slowly. Let your senses lead. Don't aim for a destination. Every once in a while, write down or say one word that captures how you feel.

Final Thought

We may not all share the same languages as our ancestors. We may not know the names of the places they left, or the exact reasons they stayed. But we carry something of them in our gestures, in our metaphors, in the way we search for home.

Les Déracinés reminds us that even in silence, we remain in dialogue.