Finland

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Somewhere in the tundra lives the worst rock and roll band in the world…. Aki Kaurismäki`s hilarious road movie follows the fortunes and misadventures of a struggling Siberian rock band, the Leningrad Cowboys.

A local promoter, stunned by the band`s lack of talent, advises them instead to try their luck in America. Accompanied by their autocratic manager, the Cowboys travel to New York, learning English on the plane. Sporting outsixe Quiffs, dark shades and outrageously long winkle-pickers, they are passed off as Americans. Jim Jarmusch, in a cameo role as a shifty car salesman, sells them an old Cadillac. The band strap their frozen bass player to the roof in a coffin full of beer, and head south….Read More »

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Fourteen desperate men named Frank, band together to escape from a repressive section of Helsinki. An English-speaking non-Frank named Pekka joins the barroom conspirators, whose avoidance of last names, and any affect, help them outsmart overwhelming forces as they sneak through dark subway tunnels and alleys, hoping against despair to reach magical seaside Eira. The Calamari Unionists take advantage of unending night to venture their intrepid journey.Read More »

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Three young people, two boys and a girl, meet on a Friday evening in an urban post-disaster setting which has brought Helsinki to ruins. The boys’ sole purpose of life is to play a Flip-Flop pinball machine.Read More »

Talkative, hyperactive young drifter Ville Alfa goes around Helsinki, basically trying to borrow money from friends and strangers by means of an incessant delivery of quirky and snappy quasi-intellectual lines and fabricated excuses.Read More »

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A woman’s terribly dull life is upended by a one-night stand pregnancy, causing her to seek retribution.Read More »

Synopsis:
A dock worker in Le Havre hears a human sound inside one of the containers in port, that container which left Gabon three weeks ago and which was supposed to arrive in London five days after its departure from Gabon, which didn’t happen. The Le Havre police and French border guards find a still alive group of illegal African immigrants inside. On the sign from one of his elders, a young teen boy among the illegal immigrants manages to escape, news of which hits the local media. The first friendly face that boy, Idrissa, encounters is that of former artist now aged shoeshine Marcel Marx. Marcel decides to help Idrissa by hiding him in his house, news which slowly trickles through his community of friends – most of whom he associates with at his local bar – and neighbors, most who assist Marcel in this task.Read More »

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After returning home from being a prisoner of war, Captain Viktor Aaltona (Jussi Jurkka) get a job from his friend, Rolf Bergas (Tauno Palo) with whom he had served. The men trust each other until Viktor meets Rolf’s wife Astrid (Elina Pohjanpää).

William Markus’s adaptation of a short novel by Mika Waltari, generally considered one of the weakest of the many films based on literary works and original screenplays by Waltari. Like Markus’s previous film, Mirjam (1957), Blood on Their Hands suffers from the near-constant use of overemphatic background, usually without much relation to what’s happening in the scene. Read More »

Mollberg’s chef d’oeuvre is this remarkable three-hours-plus adaptation of Väino Linna’s The Unknown Soldier, a monumental best-selling novel that has been called the Finnish equivalent of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. An earlier screen version, directed by Edvin Laine and released in 1955, is considered one of the great classics of the Finnish cinema, and was for decades the most commercially successful Finnish film ever made; Mollberg’s version, co- scripted by novelist Linna himself, was twice as expensive as any Finnish feature before it, and was a major critical and commercial success in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia.Read More »

IMDB Plot Summary
Small-farmer Pasi shoots four policemen who have come to arrest him for raged drunkenness. Rest of the movie is a long flashback examining the events that finally leads to the tragic shooting. As time goes by, Pasi sinks gradually deeper and deeper into the poverty, gets into trouble with both police and tax officials while family arguments grow more and more serious. Based on a true story.Read More »