Kaija Siikala

Aging professor of mathematics completes his life's work, a research project that has taken him decades, and climbs up from the boiler room (his study) and back to real life. He can hardly recognize his rebellious teenage kids and materialistic wife who hardly seem to notice his existence. The only person who is interested in the professor's work is Marja, his son's girlfriend and freshman at the university. An innocent infatuation flares up between the old man and the young girl, while the professor's family is only interested in the prize money awarded to the professor by an international jury for his academic achievements.

Lasse divorces his second wife Pirko when it turns out that he has a child with Raija. They get married, but as Lasse reflects on his three marriages, he soon becomes unsure whether marrying for the sake of the child was a wise decision after all.

The title of the Finnish film Elokuu translates to August. Directed by Matti Kassila, one of Finland's premiere filmmakers, Elokuu was adapted from a novel by Nobel prize winning finnish author F.E. Sillanpää. Simply put, the story concerns the decline and fall of a once-proud family, thanks to the alcoholism of its paterfamilias. Toivo Makela delivers a powerfully effective performance as the inebriated protagonist, avoiding the usual "drunken" cliches. The overlong running time, coupled with the downbeat nature of the subject, limited the film's worldwide appeal.

At a border check point, pregnant people are forced to endure invasive and emotionally abusive measures in order to get an abortion. The dialogue in this film is taken verbatim from State-mandated anti-choice materials, and imagines a world in which the territory of the body and the territory of the nation are collapsed into one space. Ultimately, the film explores whether this fictional world is really that different from the one we live in now. Abortion is already severly restricted in the U.S., especially for people of color and those with lower incomes, but if Roe v Wade were overturned these restrictions could expand to outright bans in up to 21 states.