Risto Jarva

Helsinki, Forever is a montage film about the city of Helsinki by the award-winning Finnish film director and academic Peter von Bagh. The film draws a portrait of Helsinki and also acts as an essay on Finnish culture in a wider sense. It shows Helsinki as captured by leading Finnish feature film and documentary makers over a period of one hundred years.

After a mixup at the check-in, Aimo Niemi boards a charter plane bound for the sunny island of Rhodes, Greece, instead of the Innsbruck Winter Olympics he's packed for. It's the early days of package tourism, and he is too shy and clueless to really sort out any of his problems — a suitcase filled with women's clothes, a flirtatious female roommate, and no money to buy food since he was prepared for full room & board in Austria.

In the year 2012 historian Raimo Lappalainen wants to illustrate how life was 50 years earlier. He becomes obsessed with the fate of a 1970s nude model Saara Turunen, and finds a perfect actress to reconstruct her life and death in front of a TV camera. Meanwhile, a strike at a nuclear plant is covered up by the media.

Jussi is a magazine editor who lives in an inherited apartment in Kruununhaka with his sister Eeva, who works as a summer editor, and his flight attendant girlfriend Leena.

Juhani, a welder and Ritva, a right-wing backgrounded, future clerk get married. Soon we see that their marriage seems to be all about long business trips, housing problems, concerns about the money and political disagreements.

Young advertising executive Vatanen suddenly quits his job and his whole life in Helsinki, and decides to spend a while in the Finnish wilderness. A wounded hare hit by a car becomes his travel companion. Together they find reclusion in the Finnish Lapland, soon to be disturbed by a noisy group of foreign tourists and their pretentious Finnish hosts. When the hare gets ill and needs to see a vet, Vatanen must return to the city and finally face the choice between his new and former life

A lonely young suburban housewife participates in a radio interview survey while simultaneously engaging in an extramarital affair.

Baron Wilhelm von Tandem, CEO of the Tandem Corporation, gets mixed up with a spitting image of himself, an innocent country boy Kalle. Both characters conveniently amnesiac, they start living each other's lives and dating each other's girlfriends, succeeding in their new roles better than in their original ones. Level-headed Kalle soon spots the bad guys who are after the Baron's money, and the Baron brings innovative ideas to the countryside.

Two men and a woman, all rallye drivers, get too closely involved, competing in the race and in love.

A psychotherapist's life is wrecked when her private life is exposed in a sensation magazine.

The futuristic aesthetics of Computers Serve offers an illustrative account of the history of computers, their prospects and the risks within, as seen in 1968. The voice-over accentuates the highly topical promulgation set against the dangers of monotonous office work and computer totalitarianism.

Young priest returns from America to work in an old Helsinki neighbourhood with idyllic wooden houses. The shy but handsome bachelor is assigned the duty of marriage counseling but is soon overwhelmed by the ladies' romantic interest directed at himself. Trying to please everybody, he also creates confusion by taking both sides in the issue of whether to preserve the neighbourhood or to go along with the modernisation plans offered by property developers.

Man leaves his factory job and sells everything to buy an earth mover and start his own business, travelling from place to place with his wife and child. There is not enough work and he is eventually forced to emigrate after many hardships.

A French cultural research group arrives in Finland. From Helsinki, the group travels to Saimaa to participate in Midsummer rituals, where the summer night celebrations overwhelm the researchers.

Pertti Ylermi Lindgren was engaged to 76 women, married none, but took the money of all. Lindgren is the real thing, as far as swindlers go. Peter von Bagh asked him to play himself in a film that would reconstruct some of his greatest moments, i.e. the most flamboyant stunts – and he agreed.

With its sharp opinions, the film is a follow-up to the film Asuminen ja luonto (Living and Nature). One of the most important Finnish short films, it is a lively analysis of urban living and the functions of the city.

Young photography model Susanna and her alienated teenage brother Veli spend the summer of 1969 travelling around Finland, mostly with another girl and her boyfriend. Sporting the latest fashions and trendy hairdos, they naïvely observe and criticise the modern consumer society, advertising, fancy boats and summer cottages, country dances, barbecues, and any other phenomena that were supposed to bother angry young intellectuals in those days. The plot and the political agenda are delivered with a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary observations, fake TV commercials, fake interviews, philosophical voiceovers and titles, and a jazzy soundtrack by the progressive rock group Wigwam.

A wildly satirical deconstruction of TV advertising.