Finland

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 »

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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 »

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Acclaimed Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki helms this deadpan, oddball road movie. Jack Bogart (Kai Wiesinger) is a dodgy car mechanic living in the backwaters of Germany. His motto is “Live for the moment; that’s all that counts,” and, indeed, for a moment he hooked up with an older Korean woman (Francisca Tu), until a couple of thugs he had previously swindled, Bruno (Hannes Hellmann) and doltish Popo, pay him a visit. Jack promptly hits the road along with bitchy Verena (Michaela Rosen) and her saucy spoiled daughter Elisabeth (Marie Zielcke). The latter falls for Jack, much to his consternation, and soon she is tagging along all the way to Finland.Read More »

One man’s quest for revenge in a post-apocalyptic worldRead More »

Another good movie from the first period of Mika, with some funny moments and great cameos like Nino Manfredi, Samuel Fuller, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Eddie Constantine.

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Alex (Kari Vaananen) is a Finnish cabbie working in Berlin with plenty of problems in this comedy with film noir touches. With two dead men and a suitcase filled with hundred dollar bills, he has difficulty disposing of the bodies. He is chased by the top crime boss (Samuel Fuller) and his crony (Eddie Constantine). Alex’s wife is allergic to the money, so the cabbie endures more than he can handle trying to rid himself of the cash and the corpses.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 »

As a train weaves its way up to the arctic circle, two strangers share a journey that will change their perspective on life.Read More »

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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 »