Finland

Description: On June 12, 1993, Audience of 70.000 people witnessed a historical event on the Senate Square in Helsinki. Leningrad Cowboys performed for the first time together with the 100 singers, 40 musicians and 20 dancers of the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble, on the biggest stage ever seen in Finland. The programme included rock classics from “Happy Together” and “Delilah” to “Gimme All Your Lovin” and “Knocking On Heaven`s Door”, as well as traditional hits from the Ensemble`s own repertoire.Read More »

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The documentary film Tobacco Girls is a story of working class women that were made redundant from the Amer tobacco company in the spring of 2004. It describes the last days in the factory and what kinds of problems women face in trying to find new jobs. The film follows the lives of the few women made redundant over a year and especially how this affects them and the kinds of problems they have to solve.

Most of these women have been working in the factory for the best part of their working lives and it is difficult to take on a new job. Younger women try to retrain themselves or are looking out for new employment. One of the main characters has a case being heard in a labour court because associates have afflicted her. The other one finds a solution by undertaking to be her mother´s carer.

The theme developed shows how globalization has changed the thinking in manufacturing. Factories are disbanded so that the production can be removed to an area where labour costs are lower, and like at Amer, to enhance the company image. Older workers become unemployed.
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First of all, You have to give points for pulling off using humouristic elements as brilliantly as this, to describe something as dreadful as war. There aren’t many movies that have achieved that without feeling constrained, or more or less morally repulsive. Kubrick and Coppola were masters of that section, and Veli-Matti Saikkonen doesn’t come far behind with his interpretation of Veijo Meri’s classic novel.
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Synopsis
A psyhiotherapist’s life is wrecked when her private life is exposed in a sensation magazine. Read More »

Portrait of a real-life swindler — played by himself! Von Bagh’s feature debut: a weird ‘n’ wild mix of fact and fiction, documentary scenes and exuberant reconstructions of purportedly true-life events, full of lewd humor and driven by a good-natured humanism. A true discoveryRead More »

Synopsis: Taking place in the year 2012, the film is a fantasy of a “utopian” time when all class conflicts have been erased, at least superficially. A history researcher Raimo Lappalainen becomes obsessed by the life of nude model Saara Turunen, a woman who died in 1976, and tries to reconstruct it for TV, with help from an actress. At the same time a strike in a nuclear plant will lead to a violent upsurge, which media only manages to keep secret from public with a clever cover-up.
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In the 1970s, a 12-year-old boy Esko lives in Tornio, northern Finland, a town bordering Sweden across the river. Esko befriends a Swedish boy, Pate, and learns to share his obsession for Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist. While standing handcuffed on the railway bridge, contemplating a stunt jump into the icy river, he reminisces the dramatic events of the summer before. For the viewer, his problems are presented with warm humour: gang fights, feeling guilty for lying, Father losing his job, Mother losing her nerves, not to mention Grandfather having lost his willingness to speak since a traumatic war experience 30 years earlier.Read More »

“The small ones get gassed and the bigger ones shot…”

Euthanizer is a violent summer noir. It tells the story of Veijo Haukka, a 50-year-old mechanic, whose second job is to put sick pets to sleep. But what happens when he decides to save the wrong person’s dog? The themes revolve around animal rights, suffering and death. But the real story is not about good or evil – it’s about the stupidity of absolute men.Read More »

Fuck Off!! – Images of Finland (1970) was a documentary which focused on people living on the margins of the society, poor, and politically active workers.
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