Jane, a small-town girl, has moved to Helsinki and the world is finally open for her. Passionate and excited, she seeks adventure, all the things she has yearned for so long. Jane gravitates to a gay bar at night, staggers in her nervous state of mind, and suddenly there, right next to her, Jane finds her savior: Piki, the most dashing butch in town. Piki is perfect. Jane is hypnotized by Piki's dark-toned voice. Piki offers her an entire new universe, and even more - dreams.
Canned Dreams shows the multi-branching network of the modern food industry. The Finnish consumer buys a can in the grocery store, but where from far away do the raw materials and packaging materials for the preserves come from - and through how many hands? The film not only traces the various stages of the production process, but gives a voice to the people who work as part of it.
Director, Joonas Berghäll, suffers from chronic Lyme disease. He looks for a cure to his illness and by doing so finds himself thrown into the midst of a worldwide lobby-driven and political medical debate about Lyme disease and the threat of it becoming the next wide scale epidemic.
Finnish men in sauna, speaking straight from the heart.
Elvira, a confident Sámi teenager, firmly believes that her lesbian single mother conceived her at a Danish fertility clinic. She often daydreams about her father, envisioning him as a charismatic movie star. However, her world is turned upside down when her real biological father unexpectedly steps into her life.
Iida, an elderly Sámi woman, who has abandoned her roots under the pressure of forced Finnishization, is conflicted between selling her old homestead and hiding her cultural heritage from her niece, as the rural way of life she has suppressed begins to creep back in.
Ribeira Quente is a fishing village in S. Miguel Island in the Azores facing the last days of a fishing activity as they know it.
A lonely 40-year-old man sits on the balcony of a Finnish apartment building. Joonas Berghäll has learned that he will die in 14 years’ time, unless he changes his way of living or attitude towards life. Joonas wants to make a film about the state of wellbeing of Finnish men, drawing from his own experiences and mirroring the society at large. The film is built around six stories. It starts with the context of school and proceeds through the contexts of military service, custody battle, burnout and substance abuse to end on the subject of premature death caused by health problems.
Examines the extraordinary lifelong friendship between Skolt Sámi storyteller Kaisa Gauriloff and the Swiss-Russian author Robert Crottet through the eyes of Gauriloff’s great-granddaughter Katja.
An astronaut sends her young son a video message from outer space. In Mexico, a stripper dances night after night to keep a roof over her child’s head. In Canada, a woman becomes a mother for the first time after enduring seven miscarriages. Finnish filmmaker Joonas Berghäll has travelled to South African settlements, Nepalese terraced fields and Russia’s metropolis Moscow to investigate an unshakable and almost magical connection: the bond between mother and child. MOTHER‘S WISH portrays 10 women from the most varied of cultural and social backgrounds who all tell of the beauty and difficulty of being a mother. These are not only stories of love and pride – but also of disappointed hopes and the most precarious of life circumstances. Above all else, however, the protagonists tell of their determination – regardless of their current living conditions – to fight for a better future.
Entrepreneur is a universal nature documentary about Finnish entrepreneurs. This warm and carnevalistic film portrays humans in the middle of ordinary everyday survival. The main protagonists come from two totally different kinds of landscapes, from two diffent time zones. There is a scenery of contemporary modern society and just a few hundred kilometres away we find a rural and nostalgic universe with forgotten people and land.Our first protagonists are Fellini-like family, going from village to another, trying to sell meat from a small meat truck and also run a tiny funfair business. The father, the mother and their four children are working together and trusting only in themselves, not in the help of society. While countryside family is counting coins, the other pair of entrepreneurs, the two well-educated women from the capital area, have invented a vegetable protein product called Pulled Oat, and have become millionaires. But have they also made a world a little bit better?
The fate of a culture lies on the shoulders of few determined individuals.
Documentary film about Arndt Pekurinen and the peace movement in the early 20th century. Pekurinen spoke out for pacifism, conscientious objection and peace, and received support for his actions around the world. However, his worldview collided with the nationalist and militaristic atmosphere of the era in Finland. He was considered a troublemaker, a traitor, and a caricature of masculinity. The film is a universal and timeless account of a man persecuted for his opinions. At the same time, it is a description of the weak tolerance of young independent Finland towards dissidents. Pekurinen was executed during the Continuation War by his compatriots on November 5, 1941.
A workaholic deliveryman struggles not to be terminated by the flashy social butterfly screaming inside him.
Story of a healing process of sámi woman who has post-traumatic stress disorder caused by sexual violence.
A magical adventure for the whole family in the land of the elves.
Nearly 2, 00, 000 farmers have committed suicide in India over the last 10 years. But the mainstream media hardly reflects this. Nero´s Guests is a story about India’s agrarian crisis and the growing inequality seen through the work of the Rural Affairs Editor of Hindu newspaper, P Sainath. Through sustained coverage of the farm crisis, Sainath and his colleagues created the national agenda, compelling a government in denial to take notice and act. Through his writings and lectures, Sainath makes us confront the India we don’t want to see, and provokes us to think about who ‘Nero’s Guests’ are in today’s world.
“If there only was someone to punch, someone to slap or beat, to whom I could unload this frustration and fury”, raves Reyna Patricia. He is one of the HIV-positive, transsexual Maya Indians, whose life is closely followed in the film Oasis.
