It’s easy enough to make a connection between “Shots” and the grim, violent, tightly constructed crime shows currently so popular on American television (and sometimes, as in the cases of “The Killing,” “The Bridge” and “Wallander,” adapted from Scandinavian sources). It dramatizes the murder of four police officers by a bitter, drunken farmer, closely tracking an actual event in north-central Finland in 1969. Opening with the shootings — whose consequences are initially depicted only by tracks and indentations in the snow — the series then shifts back in time to show, across four episodes, the events leading up to them.

Image Peter Von Bagh, a film historian and preservationist who led the work’s rediscovery. Credit... Finnish Film Foundation

What it shows isn’t detection and intrigue, however, but simply life: the hardships, backbreaking work and bureaucratic frustrations of the farmer’s life, the consolations of family and nature and the fateful effects of alcohol on rural society in general and the film’s protagonist, Pasi, in particular. The opening of each episode includes a quotation from Vaimo, Pasi’s wife: “Booze was the root of all evil in our family.”

Niskanen, a maverick in Finnish cinema in the 1960s who achieved a surprising commercial success with the 1967 rebellious-youth film “Girl of Finland,” was in a personal and creative funk when the police killings offered inspiration. Commissioned by YLE to make an 80-minute television movie, he produced a 12-hour first edit before delivering the 316-minute mini-series.

Filmed in austere black and white, and largely free of overt sentimentality or moralizing, “Eight Deadly Shots” is a work whose lyrical naturalism and sprawling but precise construction link it to classic traditions of European cinema, both Scandinavian and Eastern European. (Niskanen spent several years studying film in Moscow.) It doesn’t look like anything on TV, but some American viewers will make another connection: to the Swedish director Jan Troell’s great dramas “The Emigrants” and “The New Land,” both released within a year of the broadcast of “Eight Deadly Shots.”

Niskanen (who died of cancer in 1990) opens the film with images of the countryside shot through a windshield, presumably that of the car carrying the policemen to their deaths. The pastoral scenes are dotted with dilapidated, abandoned farm buildings. It’s as if we’re seeing the landscape the poor farmers of “The Emigrants” left behind a century before. Sleighs, hand carts and axes coexist with snowmobiles, backhoes and chain saws.