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.
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.
A young man tries to make sense of the world in the summer heat of late nineties Estonia.
Miami is the story of two sisters who have grown up separately. The older sister, Angela, is an exotic dancer with her own touring dance group. The younger, Anna, on the threshold of adulthood, lives in a small town working in sales. When their father dies, Anna looks for and finds Angela. The fascinating, high-strung Angela asks the timid Anna to accompany her on tour and, before long, trouble from Angela’s past catches up to them and the sisters’ love is put to the test.
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.