On the Tenderness of Men is a work of speculative non-fiction presenting a curious tale of Finnish cultural history, architecture, war, and displacement. The film takes the controversies of the construction of Temppeliaukio Church during the time of the Nigerian-Biafran War and its architects’ exclusion from the canon of Finnish modernism as a starting point to problematise intercommunal othering. The voice over mixes expositional writing with prose, poetry and citations, braiding multiple narrative threads and temporalities. Obfuscating the position of the narrator by ventriloquizing an assortment of speakers, the film collapses time, place and identities narratively to consider the impact of atrocities on contemporary lifeworlds. 

Minou Norouzi (b. 1971) is an Austrian filmmaker and writer. She contributes to the Journal of Visual Culture as an Editor.