Dome Karukoski
Lapland Odyssey is a comedy about Janne, a man from Lapland in northern Finland, a man who has made a career out of living on welfare. Inari, his girlfriend, is tired of Janne’s incapability of getting a grip on life, Janne wasn’t even able to buy a digital TV box that Inari had given money for. Inari gives an ultimatum: a digital box needs to arrive by dawn or she leaves. Janne sets out into the night with his two friends to find a box. On their way to the city of Rovaniemi, Janne and his friends face many challenges, obstacles and temptations. They learn that they need to be daring. There’s no room to give into bitterness. The most important thing isn’t success, but rather the journey in itself.
A stubbornly traditional eighty-year-old farmer — whose social attitudes verge on the prehistoric — raises hell when he is forced to move in with his sadsack, city-dwelling son and domineering daughter-in-law, in this hilarious social satire based on the wildly popular novel by Finnish author Tuomas Kyrö.
Touko Laaksonen, a decorated officer, returns home after a harrowing and heroic experience serving his country in World War II, but life in Finland during peacetime proves equally distressing. He finds peace-time Helsinki rampant with persecution of the homosexual and men around him even being pressured to marry women and have children. Touko finds refuge in his liberating art, specialising in homoerotic drawings of muscular men, free of inhibitions. His work – made famous by his signature ‘Tom of Finland’ – became the emblem of a generation of men and fanned the flames of a gay revolution.
Haunted by his traumatic past and cautious about the prospects of an uncertain future, a fourteen year old boy named Juhani winds up in an isolated boys’ home known as The Island. Juhani (Niilo Syvaoja) has been shuttled between foster homes and temporary families for the past six years, leaving any prospect of stability in his life a faded dream. When Juhani winds up in a remote shelter for troubled youth known as The Island, he has little idea of how ruthless superintendent Olavi Harjula (Tommi Korpela) can truly be.
Neo-Nazi falls in love with a woman who has a black son and finds himself fighting with conflicting feelings.
Explore the formative years of the orphaned author as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school. This takes him into the outbreak of World War I, which threatens to tear the “fellowship” apart. All of these experiences would inspire Tolkien to write his famous Middle-Earth novels.