Based on the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, this adaptation is fairly faithful to the original. Portraying the sinister tones of old fairy tales in a dream-like or theatrical style, this surreal film focuses mainly on the young girl Kerttu’s journey to rescue her brother Kai from the evil Snow Queen. Kerttu travels through beautiful and hostile lands, meeting various strange and threatening characters on the way – befriended and helped by some, waylaid and trapped by others. In the classic style of such tales her journey is episodic, punctuated with scenes of events unfolding at the Snow Queen’s palace.
Tag: FINLAND
Marja is a prostitute who has to run away, when her pimp Jussi robs and kills one of her costumers. She finds a hiding place in a mansion on the country side. Marja falls in love with the master of the mansion, but Jussi finds out Marjas whereabouts and comes to meet her.
Räpsy & Dolly is a tragicomic love story of a petty criminal and a former cabaret dancer. Detective Karisto releases Auno “Räpsy” Pirilä from prison, who in turn has to calve his childhood friend Börje from criminal activities. Alcoholic Dolly takes Räpsy to live in Kallio, Helsinki, and hopes to move to Paris with her in the spring.
Teuvo Tulio’s oldest surviving film follows a spoilt and arrogant young man, the son of a landowner, playing fast and loose with the affections of a number of young women. In fact, he’s so busy seducing the women of the region that it’s a wonder any actual farming gets done at all. But eventually he finds himself forced to face up to his social and sexual responsibilities.
A tragicomic documentary in which the film crew walks door to door with three vacuum cleaner salesmen. The dream of success meets the recession of Finland in the 1990s.
Two accident-prone plumbers go to fix the plumbing at a home for retired gentle-folk on the coldest day of the year in Finland. Everything that can go wrong for these plumbers goes wrong.
Losing faith in their original idea for a movie to celebrate Finland’s 50 years of independence, a film crew decides to hire a typical Finnish taxpayer to tell them what to shoot. The result becomes a comedic cavalcade of Finnish promotional clichés – Lapland, sauna, moose hunting, beautiful blond women etc. – as presented by a slick entourage following on the heels of William Nurmi, a Finnish-American hair tonic millionaire on a visit to his ancestors’ homeland. Add some half-baked criminal hanky-panky, and towards the end even one of the main characters has to confess to the camera that he’s lost track of this movie’s plot about fifteen minutes ago.