Aake Kivalo

After her father's funeral, Maarit plans to return to Thailand. On the day of the departure, she finds her mother Sylvi and her father’s taxidermy badger in a bar and Sylvi makes a revelation that may change Maarit’s departure plans.

X is wondering when a thing becomes a thing, and when some other thing becomes too much. X is to wonder how do you know if not by intuition, when peculiarity becomes overpowering or when danger becomes arousing or when violence escapes its sexy boundaries? The short film is part of Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 26-part Survival Guide for the Post-Apocalyptic Child.

Pepe Willberg has travelled a winding road to this day, to the hearts of Finns and unlikely stardom. What has it all been like for a man who, in the beginning, sang only on condition that the lights in the hall were turned off? Written and directed by Severi Koivusalo, PEPE is a musical documentary about a talented musician with a unique voice, who struggles to balance his popularity with his passion for music, whose iconic songs have been playing in the background of Finnish life through seven different decades.

The film reveals, what kind of a film AI would write based on previous Finnish popular films.

Shades of light, dark, and significantly grey, are explored in Orbit, which depicts notions of adultery. In this project, which blends elements of concrete and abstract, women of various ages give insights into their thoughts and feelings on their affairs. As they do, the black and white preconceptions slowly begin to melt off rugged, wrinkled, skin, which the camera interprets from an almost obscenely close distance.

"Everything In Between" follows a group of filmmakers that are passionate about their work. An intimate portrait of film making and the deep trust that develops in these exceptional circumstances.

“A person has to have something to live for”. Pentti is a 94-year-old widower who steps into a new phase in his life having found filmmaking – and the feisty Lea.

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The daily life of an ill man is constantly interrupted by television advertisements. They promise some change to his life. He finds himself as a part of the adverts, but soon the empty promises become demonically possessive. The truth sets in.

Those Who Kept the Light is a project loosely based on stories of female lighthouse keepers in Scandinavia. The project explores our co-dependent relationship to the sea in context of queer and feminist maritime narratives. The narratives are often told through the voices and context of more-than human others, such as the wind, a prawn or a lighthouse. The sea, the wind, the ocean are seen as entities with consciousness and a voice. Within the wider framework of climate emergency and the role of the fragile ecosystems of the ocean, the project explores the collective mind-set of imagination, hope and imagined spaces of solace and power through and within epic and barren Nordic landscape.

The life of the main character goes off the rails when she realizes that she is being rewarded for her youth and beauty in ways that exceed her other achievements. While trying to find a time machine for her life, she drifts deeper into patriarchal beauty rituals, building her identity and happiness on her appearance.

Nastja Säde Rönkkö recites one poem with three narrators: a teardrop, a droplet of blood and a bead of sweat. Each tells love stories through biochemistry – about love, belonging and loss, and about crises lived and impending. The words are vivid but not enough, supercharged here by hyperreal images of landscapes both physical and emotional, and the fluids expressing and crystallising them.

In the beginning of 1990s Finland was faced with the most serious financial crisis of its history; recession. Over 400,000 unemployed persons, almost 200 000 bankruptcies and a whole national offspring of insecurity were born in a country with around 5 million in population, all within a few years. How does the childhood during depression look like from adulthood?