Sonja Lindén

"Pieniä Eroja" is a film about Salla - a 13-year-old girl who has a crush on her ex-teacher from the lower level of the comprehensive school, Tarsala. Starting the upper level herself, Salla dreams of Tarsala and eventually they become friends.

Once a beloved playmate of her childhood, Markku had withdrawn into solitude, devoting his life to inner freedom and creativity rather than the expectations of society. Now his voice returns – sometimes playful, sometimes wounded, always searching – guiding Karin through his life’s work and opening space for an unusual collaboration between the living and the dead.

Wanting to know the ways of people, a pelican turns into a gawky young man who soon learns to speak, thanks to his outstanding talent in imitation. He befriends Emil and Elsa, two children who--unlike adults--see that their new neighbor "Mr Berd" is not human but a big bird wearing a suit. The Pelican Man lands a job at the opera and falls in love with a pretty ballerina, looking so much like a bird herself. Troubles start when adults too find out about "Mr Berd's" ornithological origin.

A Roma beggar on his knees raises many extreme emotions: guilt, rage, sympathy and frustration. Most people just walk on by, but there is always someone willing to help. In this film, the director follows the confrontations between the Roma beggars from Romania and Finnish people, and is forced to question, over and over again, her own ideas about helping.

A sequel to Soinio's film Kuutamosonaatti (Moonlight Sonata) of 1988. A rural family clings to life until the resourceful Sulo uses the salvific powers of sauna, moonshine, and tar to resurrect his injured brother Arvo, their deceased mother, and even buried revolutionaries. When Arvo drifts to Helsinki and falls into illicit moonshining and wild pursuits of a celebrity, Sulo and their revived mother set out to retrieve him from his urban excesses.

A sensitive short film about a first kiss. It is a story about Ville, a twelwe-year-old boy, who receives a letter from Sirkka. Sirkka wants to meet and to kiss him.

What would you like to see if you couldn’t see any more? A blind mother and her seven-year-old son teach each other how to navigate the world as his vision slowly fades and a new life awaits.

A man lives alone on his island. He keeps in contact with his sick wife every day by phone but shares his everyday life with a cat. His seasonal activities are tinged with his quirky humour and philosophy of life and also music in its many forms.

Forever Yours is a film about children who have been taken into custody. Through the children, their biological parents and foster parents, the film depicts love in everyday life. The film explores the invisible bond between a child and a biological parent. Even when a child is taken into custody, the yearning for closeness to the biological parents and need for their approval never seems to disappear. This longing is a form of loneliness that the foster parents struggle to overcome. The film describes the entire foster care process: a child being brought into a shelter home, a teenager’s everyday life in a foster family, and siblings preparing to return to their biological mother, after five years in a foster family.

Director Sonja Lindén's personal and sensitive quest to the core of the modern information society where technology and human beings get more and more entwined. This documentary explores our society on the verge of turning ubiquitous - a wireless society, where the laws of time, space and distance are revolutionizing the concept of liaison. Do the consequences of the technological revolution increase our freedom, or do they limit us? Is it possible to find a balance between one's natural rhythm and the society that spins at an ever increasing and demanding speed? Are we chasing echoes of our lost inner wholeness in our everyday lives, which are becoming busier and more fragmented than ever before?

Helena, the main character of the film, grew up in a small town on the west coast of Finland in the 1960s and 70s, together with the emerging welfare in Finland. Her parents lived through the Second World War; her father was on the frontline, and her mother in her family home, burdened with helping to maintain the family. Helena’s family, the surrounding society and the era of her childhood profoundly shaped her experience. The landscapes of her childhood still live vividly in her mind.