Kekkosentie Road - A Monument for a Politician

This important documentary about “the killing of a neighbourhood” in Tampere is one of the main works of Untamo Eerola, a Finnish documentarist with a long career in film-making. The Eastern bypass, Kekkosentie Road, a road construction project named after the Finnish head of state, cut through the old wooden house community of Petsamo in Tampere at the end of the 1980s. The construction project stirred up widespread and ferocious opposition, but faster connections for new residential areas outweighed in value the wooden house heritage. The documentary follows the construction project of Kekkosentie Road that split in half the detached house community of Petsamo, from September 1987 until the opening of the road for traffic on Tampere Day, 1 October 1989. (Tampere Film Festival)