Popular From Finland

Over a blue screen, a voiceover narrates The Artist’s experience of a sanatorium, where they were supposed to make a piece of art, but did not.

Sacre 2: HEX is the second part of The Sacre Trilogy by Anni Puolakka and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The solemn cybergoth dance enthusiast introduced in the first part of the trilogy (Sacre, 2015) has graduated into a smug Wiccan vlogger. Her formerly know-it-all brother has fallen on hard times and now needs her help. Family relations entangle with work anxiety. Virtual and material survival tactics get tested. Spiritual, financial and social layers mesh in money-burning rituals. A damaged sibling dynamic is further destabilized by a seductive alien.

Between the Fist and the Stove is a hilarious, fictional film, a melodrama and a tragicomedy based on clips from old Finnish films from the 1940s and 1950s. It is a synthesis of Finland’s Bold and the Beautiful – of a time when the swing of the haystack band made the public wild. Passion, jealousy, lust and forgiveness meet in the surges of the rapids and at the gates of heaven.

“Cricket refers to mass communication, which bridges the gap between residents in different cities separated by geography and culture. This video also reveals how appearances can deceive, for a sense of individualism is born out of harmonious unity. Like crickets, it takes shape, gently splitting and singing at first and ultimately subsuming the entire body to bring a person to madness and schizophrenia. The video images are reconstructed montages of performances that have been reassembled in chronological order. The conclusion appears sinister; but, what is worse, a detached mass person, all parts behaving as one, or a personality scourged by individual desires?” – Marikki Hakola

A group of former Finnish special forces operatives seek for new challenges as they plan to ski unsupported across the Greenland ice sheet. The plan is to travel from west coast to the east coast in 36 days or less.

The screen is in flames as we are inside a crematorium. No much can be seen and the director focuses on the sound recording of the conversations between the employees. There is no place for mystical experiences in their lives, to the contrary – they perform all their tasks mechanically. Cremation is a simple process which turns a human corpse into ash.

After a childhood spent tightly together with her twin sister, Apila began to question gender identity. This started a long process of self-acceptance, complicated by expectations set by the environment and society.

A restless suburb in the Northeast-Helsinki. A drunk is raving violently in the hallway. A post box frame is stuck on his arm. There is blood on the stairs. Black Hole Mama does not romanticize poverty. Some residents have clearly lost control over their own lives and consume alcohol in unhealthy amounts. Still, as the rascals and yobs tell their life stories, it is difficult not to be surprised and touched. The black and white imagery emphasizes the nostalgic yet timeless mood of the film. It is easy like a summer afternoon, sunny with just a hint of sadness.

A bird and a bat are neighbors in a tree. Their different lifestyles lead to conflict between them.

Four individuals are discussing about morality, survival - and, above all, eating. Who defines what is right or wrong in the situation with less and less options?

Vappuhumua, filmed by Ama Jokinen, is a rarity from the late 1930s, a great experimental short film about the May Day celebrations of Helsinki residents. It offers excitement and unique angles using prism optics. This May Day photo truly lives and breathes, in a word, swings. "You had the desire to hug and I had the skill to do it..."

A couple spend christmas with the husband's grumpy father.

Documentary about middle-aged men's ballet group.

Everyone needs to be free, even if the cost of this freedom is high – this is the message that Nosfe, a young Finnish film-maker delivers via his short film Pako completed in 2001. This rebellious work captivates us through a succession of provocative slogans that accompany a rapid flow of images of Helsinki.

A documentary about the city of Tampere, Finland, and its citizens.

Two burglars in the wrong house at the wrong time.

Googoosh, a popular and loved iranian-azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song Ayrılıq – Separation. The performance is from 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. Ayrılıq could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi (who at the age of 16 moved from Soviet Azerbaijan to Iran with his family and left many of his loved ones behind) wanted to make music about his sense of longing. I was searching for another song when I found this performance on YouTube. I could watch the video again and again and try to get a deeper understanding of it. I could use the performance as a mirror for the part in me that is of Iranian and Azeri origin. I could compare my sense of longing with the degraded video image and the lyrics of the song. And in my eyes the found video grew into a monument of distance – a presentation of disconnection, images, memory and mixed identification.

A woman from Lapland falls in love with a Viennese soldier during World War II, becomes pregnant and leaves Finland. She gives birth in Hamburg, but later becomes home-sick and returns to her country. The woman is Mari Soppela’s grandmother, the starting point of Soppela’s film, Family Files. Naturally, it is only the start of the film: in the Soppela family saga, it is merely one link in an endless chain.

A hand-developed 16mm experimental film that questions the glamourized individualism in today’s culture and media.