Kaarle Aho

Fleeing from the Russian secret police, a young Estonian fencer is forced to return to his homeland, where he becomes a physical education teacher at a local school. The past however catches up and puts him in front of a difficult choice.

Turo is stuck in a small village and the best thing in his life is being the lead vocalist for the amateur metal band Impaled Rektum. He and his bandmates have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. The guys get a surprise visitor from Norway -- the promoter for a huge heavy metal music festival -- and decide it's now or never. They steal a van, a corpse, and even a new drummer to make their dreams a reality.

The thorny relationship between a woman and her retired father worsens after he becomes romantically involved with the housekeeper she hires for him.

The world's hardest - and weirdest - heavy metal band Impaled Rektum is serving their sentence in Norway's nicest prison. They receive word that guitarist Lotvonen's parents' reindeer herding farm is about to come under the hammer. It will take a big gig and big money to save the farm. A breakout ensues and a trip to the world's biggest heavy festival, Wacken in northern Germany begins. The higher the target, the bigger the obstacles. This is what the boys will experience on their epic journey to the main stage of Wacken - every metalhead's heaven.

Saara is a middle-aged doctor who one day finds out that her architect-husband Leo is having an affair with a younger woman, Tuuli. Instead of revealing her true identity, Saara pretends to be someone else and makes friends with Tuuli. At the same time she is planning the best way to revenge her husband and his lover.

In the 1860’s Alaska and Finland are simultaneously parts of the Russian Empire. A Finnish mining engineer Simon buys a Tlingit girl named Tsamo and decides to bring her to Finland. The child, Tsamo, is baptized and Simon starts to teach her European manners. Tsamo thinks she’s married to Simon and acts accordingly, but when Simon marries a lady of his own age and class, she gets confused. Simon is forced to send the girl away and the battle over Tsamo’s identity takes complicated turns.

Fleeing from the Russian secret police, a young Estonian fencer is forced to return to his homeland, where he becomes a physical education teacher at a local school. The past however catches up and puts him in front of a difficult choice.

Turo is stuck in a small village and the best thing in his life is being the lead vocalist for the amateur metal band Impaled Rektum. He and his bandmates have practiced for 12 years without playing a single gig. The guys get a surprise visitor from Norway -- the promoter for a huge heavy metal music festival -- and decide it's now or never. They steal a van, a corpse, and even a new drummer to make their dreams a reality.

The thorny relationship between a woman and her retired father worsens after he becomes romantically involved with the housekeeper she hires for him.

The world's hardest - and weirdest - heavy metal band Impaled Rektum is serving their sentence in Norway's nicest prison. They receive word that guitarist Lotvonen's parents' reindeer herding farm is about to come under the hammer. It will take a big gig and big money to save the farm. A breakout ensues and a trip to the world's biggest heavy festival, Wacken in northern Germany begins. The higher the target, the bigger the obstacles. This is what the boys will experience on their epic journey to the main stage of Wacken - every metalhead's heaven.

Saara is a middle-aged doctor who one day finds out that her architect-husband Leo is having an affair with a younger woman, Tuuli. Instead of revealing her true identity, Saara pretends to be someone else and makes friends with Tuuli. At the same time she is planning the best way to revenge her husband and his lover.

In the 1860’s Alaska and Finland are simultaneously parts of the Russian Empire. A Finnish mining engineer Simon buys a Tlingit girl named Tsamo and decides to bring her to Finland. The child, Tsamo, is baptized and Simon starts to teach her European manners. Tsamo thinks she’s married to Simon and acts accordingly, but when Simon marries a lady of his own age and class, she gets confused. Simon is forced to send the girl away and the battle over Tsamo’s identity takes complicated turns.

Maria's ex-boyfriend Kristian is homeless and moves back in with Maria. Maria works as a nurse at the home of Eeva, a paralyzed writer.

Olavi, an aged and shabby art dealer, is planning to retire. Accidentally he finds an old painting that he suspects being much more valuable than his colleagues have priced it. He decides to try to prove for the last time for himself, his colleagues and his estranged family that he can make it.

Ivan, a Bulgarian taxi driver living at the Golden Sands tourist resort, is saving money in order to go back to Finland to meet his ex-wife and son, and to make amends for his past mistakes. But money is tight, and eventually Ivan will resort to extreme measures.

Ivan, a Bulgarian taxi driver living at the Golden Sands tourist resort, is saving money in order to go back to Finland to meet his ex-wife and son, and to make amends for his past mistakes. But money is tight, and eventually Ivan will resort to extreme measures.

A Finnish documentary follows four young men who have one year to find new love in Helsinki.

A Finnish documentary follows four young men who have one year to find new love in Helsinki.

Two men, a Finn and a Belarusian live alone, on a lake's island.

A retiring policeman gets caught up in between two younger men trying to kill each other. A modern borderline western taking place on both sides of the northern Finnish-Swedish border.

Haunted by childhood traumas, Veera is trying to become more independent through live-action role-playing. As she guides herself and her mentally challenged brother through worlds of multiple roles and identities, witches and wizards, she finds the courage to face the demons of her own past and her abusive father’s legacy.

Haunted by childhood traumas, Veera is trying to become more independent through live-action role-playing. As she guides herself and her mentally challenged brother through worlds of multiple roles and identities, witches and wizards, she finds the courage to face the demons of her own past and her abusive father’s legacy.

Set against a worsening environmental crisis, a character-driven narrative charts the human and geopolitical fallout of climate change.

18 year old Juri is seriously addicted to online gaming, so much so he becomes isolated from his single mother and pushes his girlfriend to the brink of leaving him. He decides to quit, but is soon lured back by one of his net-mates, Niki, who - when they meet for the first time - turns out to look strikingly like Juri. Niki has a web-address tattooed on his arm and when Juri types it into his computer, he gets drawn into a curious game that grants him the username RAT KING. As the game becomes increasingly dangerous, Niki vows to help Juri get through it. But the game triggers a series of life-threatening events and pretty soon Juri realizes that he is gaming for his life.

Marja tries to make ends meet by taking night shifts in a newspaper delivery service, apparently mostly carried out by foreigners. During the day, she sleeps and strives to raise her little daughter as best as she can. As a single parent and lacking a solid income, life is a constant struggle. Things are about to go from bad to worse when she meets her ex-boyfriend whose obsessive demeanour about whether he is the father of Marja´s child will drive her to the edge of sanity.

In 1984, eleven miners entrenched themselves underground to protest for better working conditions in the mining village of Almaden in southern Spain. The strike, deep within the toxic mercury mine, lasted for eleven long days, during which the whole village showed its solidarity with the men protesting underground. The mine was the heart of Almaden, around which everything revolved – until it longer existed. The mercury mine was closed for good at the beginning of the 21st century. As a consequence, the area has experienced mass unemployment and slow decline.

In 1984, eleven miners entrenched themselves underground to protest for better working conditions in the mining village of Almaden in southern Spain. The strike, deep within the toxic mercury mine, lasted for eleven long days, during which the whole village showed its solidarity with the men protesting underground. The mine was the heart of Almaden, around which everything revolved – until it longer existed. The mercury mine was closed for good at the beginning of the 21st century. As a consequence, the area has experienced mass unemployment and slow decline.

Most of us think of death as something clear-cut, and that medical science has it neatly figured out. This feature documentary explodes such assumptions through its exploration of a phenomenon that blurs life and death to an unprecedented degree. In what Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, advanced meditators die in a consciously controlled manner. Though dead according to our biomedical standards, they often stay sitting upright in meditation; remarkably, their bodies remain fresh and lifelike, without signs of decay for days, sometimes weeks after clinical death. Following ground-breaking scientific research into tukdam and taking us into intimate death stories of Tibetan meditators, the film juxtaposes scientific and Tibetan perspectives as it tries to unravel the mystery of tukdam.

Little Wing tells the story of 12-year-old Varpu, who's quickly growing to adulthood, and about her mother, who doesn't want to grow up. Varpu lives with her mother and has never met her father. One night Varpu has enough of her riding buddies and her mother. She steals a car and drives up north in search of her father, of whom she only knows the name. But her father is not exactly what she had expected. Meeting him trigger something in Varpu and mother's life, making them realize their role in each other's lives, and in the world.

In 1988, 20-year-old Kirsi Marie Liimatainen travels from Finland to the GDR, to study Marxism-Leninism at the International Youth Academy. In summer of´89 the course ends and the students spread out over the world. Afew months later, the Berlin Wall falls. 24 years later Kirsi, sets out on a cinematic journey to Nicaragua, South Africa, Chile, Bolivia, Lebanon, Germany and Finland to meet up once more with her former fellow students. What remains of their dream of the liberation of the oppressed?

Aila is looking for a lost cat when she meets Simo, a young man of few words.

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

Leila is a recently divorced woman. She looks around the empty house and finds it difficult to understand that this is her life. The night before moving out, Leila wakes up to a knocking that seems to come from inside her living room wall. A man inside claims to be a time traveler from the future.

Thirty-year-old twins Jenna and Joni find out that their father has a third child. Sister Jóna lives in Iceland. The siblings' meeting will change everyone's world, relationships and future. As each searches for meaning in their own lives, surging between one father, two homelands and three adult siblings, from reunification to separation and back again. Over the years, the siblings encounter themselves and each other, their similarities and differences.

NATO’s nuclear exercise, a 12-minute uninterrupted tracking shot, and the Finnish Eurovision Song Contest entries collide in the night of Helsinki in November 1983. The film presents various apocalyptic scenarios, and based on them, presents an alternative storyline from the perspective of the scenarios' targets, on a real scale, on the streets of nocturnal Helsinki. The difference between imaginary and real nuclear war is revealed to be frighteningly fragile.

Angel of the North is based on Hugo Simberg's painting: The Wounded Angel. It depicts two teenagers carrying a wounded angel on a stretcher in a barren landscape. Since its creation in 1903, this work, elected "the most beloved" by the Finns, has become a national enigma because the painter has never provided an explanation for it.

Geri, 18, is a Bulgarian girl living in an orphanage in the city of Vratza. She's a senior at local high school. She's dreaming of entering university. The final exams are approaching, and this has even bigger meaning for her than to many others, because after the graduation she is obliged to move out from the orphanage. Geri starts to go through her past with her stepbrother; the domestic violence behind the breakup of the family. She would love to know why her mother abandoned her and why she was not given to a foster family but had to grow up at the orphanage. She hesitates should she invite the mother to her prom. Geri also had a boyfriend who wanted her to quit the school and emigrate to Germany. He returns for the prom. The prom night is wonderful, full of hope and joy, but there are new twists of fate looming around the corner. Can Geri overcome her past or repeat the family's old mistakes in different form?

Light Snatcher dives deep into the intriguing architectural world of light and darkness, led by architect and academic Juha Leiviskä. The film takes a stroll into some of Leiviskä’s own creations, as well as Myyrmäki’s church and Vallila’s library, stopping by a few other international inspirations along the way. Through examples, calculations, and sketches, Leiviskä demonstrates the significance of light in architecture with such skill, that soon viewers can’t help but observe light as an ever-present saint who serves as the seamless crossing point between art and nature.

Low key documentary recording the daily life of an elderly blind man in Russia.

Santeri (13) looks on as older guys are driving their motor bikes and wants to be part of their world. He combs his hair and goes to meet his friend Anna (13). At Anna's home childhood's anarchy meets puberty.

A documentary about girls and horses, care and competition, the unique world of youth and growing into adulthood.

A shaman tells Annika that she has hidden gifts. He’s is manipulative and dangerous but the new-found powers make Annika much more than a victim.

At a remote resort in Kilpisjärvi, middle-aged boat driver Virpi needs to clear her reputation, resolve her past and prevent problems by tracking down a missing Japanese tourist she’s accused of having robbed.

At a remote resort in Kilpisjärvi, middle-aged boat driver Virpi needs to clear her reputation, resolve her past and prevent problems by tracking down a missing Japanese tourist she’s accused of having robbed.