Synopsis

Venice Beach, 2009. Documentary filmmaker Punkki begins filming Pauliina Talus: an IFBB pro bodybuilder from Northern Finland, radiant, relentless, and determined to perfect her brand.

They share a name, a home region, and left-handedness—yet everything else divides them. Punkki wants to make a feminist heroine story. Pauliina wants to polish her brand. Each uses the other; each hides—Pauliina behind muscle and positivity, Punkki behind the camera. The film collapses. Funding disappears. Pauliina vanishes.

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The Two Pauliinas is a documentary about two women who have, all along, been doing the same thing by different means: building armor that both protects and isolates. It is a film about what happens when the director turns from behind her tools—the camera, theory, another woman—toward her own image. The question running through the entire film is: can you look at another person honestly before you have learned to look at yourself?

The film spans fifteen years of footage and two returns to the same person. It offers neither reconciliation nor resolution. It offers a way of looking.