Täältä tullaan elämä! (1980) (Right On, Man!) begins with the birth of a baby boy then is immediately followed by a performance of Juosten kohti elämään (Running Towards Life) by punk band Pelle Miljoona at the famous Helsinki venue Kill City. The singer screams: “I was born into a headwind. I began to climb […]

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  Jörn Donner’s adaptation of Märtä Tikkanen’s novel of the same name, Miestä ei voi raiskata (1978) (Men Can’t Be Raped), is a controversial and, for the time, daring examination of gender equality (or inequality), but told through the extraordinary proposition of male rape. Eva Rander (Anna Godenius) decides to celebrate her fortieth birthday with […]

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  Jäniksen vuosi (1977) (The Year of the Hare) was based on Arto Paasilinna’s bestselling novel of the same name and was Risto Jarva’s third successive comedy following Mies, joka ei ossanut sanoa ei (1975) and Loma (1976). It also stars Antti Litja again in the lead role. Of these three films, Jäniksen vuosi is […]

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  Rauni Mollberg’s Aika hyvä ihmiseksi (1977) (Pretty Good for a Human Being) is a cavalcade of characters depicting life a few years after the Finnish Civil War in a small city quarter filled with wooden houses and a market square. The film comes with a gallery of colourful characters, all with their own stories […]

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  Loma (1976) (The Vacation) is Risto Jarva’s second of three classic drama-comedies from the 1970s. Here Aimo Niemi (Antti Litja) is a banker-poet whose marriage is over and decides to get away from it all by taking a winter holiday in Innsbruck, Austria, to coincide with the Winter Olympic Games. At the airport check-in […]

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  A lot of early Finnish cinema before and after the wars of the 1940s focused on the relationship with Finland’s neighbour to the East. By 1975 the political climate had developed to a point where peaceful coexistence was regarded as advantageous for all parties, and would soon be codified in the Helsinki Accords at […]

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Risto Jarva’s light-hearted comedy Mies, joka ei osannut sanoa ei (1975) (The Man Who Couldn’t Say No) was a definite change of pace from his previous films, which were far more serious in subject matter and, as it turned out, less successful at the box office, although generally praised by critics. The success of this […]

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  Whatever you say about Uuno Turhapuro, one thing you can’t deny is how successful the character has been. Between 1973 and 2004 there have been 19 films and, in 1984, Uuno Turhapuro armeijan leivissä set a new record of 750,000 viewers, making it the most popular film of the decade (including foreign titles) and […]

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  Ignored by filmgoers upon its release in 1973, Teuvo Tulio’s Sensuela is today rightly regarded as a cult classic of Finnish cinema and, as recently as 2012, has been ranked by Finnish film critics in the Top10 best Finnish film of all time. Sensuela in undoubtedly a unique film: a camp, erotic melodrama that […]

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If Rauni Mollberg’s film Maa on syntinen laulu (1973) (The Earth is a Sinful Song) is accurate, life in Finnish Lapland in the years just after the end of the war was bleak, brutal and without much to be optimistic about. Martta (Maritta Viitamäki) is a young woman who lives on a small farm with […]

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