Juhan Ulfsak
The reception for Finland’s Independence Day is rudely interrupted when the presidential palace is attacked and the state leadership is taken hostage. Max Tanner of the Security Police is appointed as a negotiator in the hostage crisis, that unfolds as part of a bigger plan to undermine European security.
The Lapland tundra. Rupi is a young miner who fills his days by traficking in illegal pills, drinking, and dropping coins in a slot machine. After his friend is murdered, Rupi realises that he loves his friend’s widow. But the mine owner wants her too. The violence becomes a spectacle, the tragedy comic, the tundra cold, the people degenerate and hope ephemeral, like a star shooting through the sky. But even in this world, hope briefly rears its head.
Wind is blasting through your speeding car but the heat still burns your lips. The radio is pounding local pop hits from the 90s. Vodka gets poured down as if to quench a thirst. You let your head fall back and stare at the sky from under your cap, thinking: what the hell should I do with this life? And suddenly, the lyrics hit you – yes, you really need those loving arms around you.
A 14-year-old boy in a stifling Helsinki slum takes some unwise life lessons from his soon-to-be-incarcerated older brother, in Finnish master Pirjo Honkasalo’s gorgeously stylized and emotionally devastating work about what we pass on to younger generations, and the ways we do it.