“Weekends alone with my mother were the most frightening. On weekdays, I knew my parent had to go to work the next day, and so the bottle cap would stay on. On Friday, however, after a working day, glass bottles rattled in the shopping bag, and in the middle of the night you could wake up to the rumble in the hallway.

This is how the protagonists of the short film My Sister Jonna and Milja reminisce about their own childhood with their parents who suffer from alcoholism – and so, unfortunately, many others do. It is lonely and frightening to grow up with a drinking parent, and the child alone cannot seek help. It is frightening when a mother’s or father’s drunken behaviour is not understood and then when it is understood, the scars it leaves still hurt in adolescence and adulthood.

The film My Sister has been directed and written by filmmaker Laura Malinen, and it is her thesis from the Academy of Arts of Turku University of Applied Sciences.

Alko wants to challenge all adults to consider how even an adult’s moderate alcohol consumption can affect a child’s life and how it may feel. The film My Sister realistically describes the experiences of a young adult Jonna and her little sister Milja about living in an intoxicant family.

A study by the National Institute for Health and Welfare has calculated that there are an estimated 65,000–70,000 children under the age of 18 in Finland whose parents have a serious substance abuse problem. Alko wants to raise a socially important issue by purchasing the film’s performance rights and communicating it in its own channels.”

Find more from Alko (Finland, March 2022)