Finnish

Synopsis
The first Finnish film was made in 1907, but sadly lost forever. So to mark the 100th anniversary year of the Finnish independence, film has now been remade by Juho Kuosmanen (THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MÄKI) following several silent film traditions: shot on B&W 16 mm film and performed with live music and a live foley artist. In the film two siblings inherit all the essentials for a good life: moonshine equipment and a pig. As they embark on their journey, business is good until a card shark arrives.Read More »

Alexander Pushkin’s adaptation. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper runs away with a shipwrecked businessman to the city. But instead of her dreams, she finds herself selling herself in the streets, until a painter finds her as an ideal model for his next painting.Read More »

Finnish director Risto Jarva’s fascinating, futuristic sci-fi mystery is set in a dystopian, Pop Art-designed world of gleaming white towers, Sony video monitors and inflatable furniture, where the beautiful inhabitants all dress as Edie Sedgwick-like pixie sprites or medieval page boys out of LOGAN’S RUN. A historian of late 20th century culture – “before class boundaries were abolished” – named Raimo (Arto Tuominen) is researching the death many years earlier of a free-spirited erotic model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) who died under mysterious circumstances.Read More »

PLOT: The second part of Aki Kaurismaki “Finland” trilogy, the film follows a man who arrives in Helsinki and gets beaten up so severely he develops amnesia. Unable to remember his name or anything from his past life, he cannot get a job or an apartment, so he starts living on the outskirts of the city and slowly starts putting his life back on track.Read More »

Director Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching is a Finnish body-horror coming-of-age nightmare. The film is centered on Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), a twelve-year-old girl who feels the burden of perfection. Her mother (Sophia Heikkilä), referred to only as Mother, has forced Tinja into gymnastics to create an idealized image of a perfect family for her YouTube blog videos. Mother cares more for the online image she’s carefully cultivating than the reality of her family. Mother and Tinja are always in matching white lace dresses, and brother Matias (Oiva Ollila) and Father (Jani Volanen) wear matching crisp button-ups.Read More »

Quote:
Mimmi, Emma and Rönkkö are girls at the cusp of womanhood, trying to draw their own contours. In three consecutive Fridays, two of them experience the earth moving effects of falling in love, while the third goes on a quest to find something she’s never experienced before: pleasure.Read More »

Tradition versus industrialism.
The world of The Last Ones is set in a small mining village, in the Lapland tundra, filled with tensions between local reindeer herders and miners.
The struggling mine owner, nicknamed The Fisherman, supplies his workers with drugs so they’ll forget a tough existence. The nearby small community of reindeer breeders also struggles.
This critique of capitalism unfolds against a Western like landscape, as the film raises questions about the use and worth of the Arctic lands. The story also tackles romantic conflicts and northern melancholy with a touch of dark humor.
According to director Õunpuu, The Last Ones aims to depict an image of the current state of the world.Read More »

Quote:
With a keen sense of visual beauty, director Markku Lehmuskallio has created a thought-provoking, aesthetic film about a married couple and an old man living in a remote part of Finland. The young husband goes out hunting but only to support himself and his wife, not to kill off hordes of animals. He sets traps, and that gets him in trouble with the police who proceed to ticket him for using the devices. The forest cycles themselves are intimated when an old tree is shown falling to earth — perhaps a reflection on the old man’s passing years. In contrast to these few people living off the land and basically keeping the ecological balance intact, a highway construction crew is shown at work felling trees. Soon the antagonism grows between encroaching civilization and the quiet life of the young couple and elderly man.Read More »

Musta jää (Black Ice) has won the Jussi for Best Film of 2007. The film directed and written by Petri Kotwica managed to collect six of the 15 ‘Finnish Oscars’. The prestigious awards were presented in Helsinki during the traditional annual Jussi gala on Sunday night.Read More »