Milka Ahlroth

A restaurateur befriends a Syrian refugee who has recently arrived in Finland.

The year is 1984. It's summer, and the rebellious 12-year-old girl Kid wants to stay in Gothenburg, but her mother has other plans. Kid discovers that summer vacation in Finland isn't as bad as first feared. In a few hot weeks she discovers her dawning sexuality, and experience her first crush.

Story about human relationships, love and forgiveness.

In this stylish Finnish drama, the secrets and desires of a family can no longer be suppressed. Mikko turns out to have a hereditary illness. Since then he has been worried. How long can he continue to run the family business that he and inherited from his father, just like his illness? And how does he tell his teenage daughter and adult son that they might have the wrong genes? The imaginative eight-year-old Lumi, adopted from China, also cannot get away from her roots.

When Marja becomes pregnant as a result of an unauthorized relationship, the man denies the whole relationship. A pregnant young woman is left alone. Marja ends up with an illegal abortion when there are only bad options ahead.

Country boy Oskari travels with his mother to the city. There he meets his superhero. However, all is not quite as seven-year-old Oskari imagined. He is faced with a difficult choice. Superhero is dark-skinned and doesn´t look like the action figure he owns.

The director Lauri Nurkse tells that Veijarit is a film about "arjensietokyvyttömyys" (= inability to tolerate everyday life) and about the Peter Pan complex. The main actor Mikko Leppilampi says it's about "kolkyttoistavuotiaat" (= thirtyeenagers = people of thirty behaving like teenagers). An immediate reference point is the commedia all'italiana of the 1950s and the 1960s, the black comedy often exposing the infantile stage of development of the Italian male. Saku and Ässä are anti-heroes, but we never fail to sense the humanity behind their shallow and crazy ways. Veijarit is a satire and a parody of a superficial way of life, but there is a vitality in the protagonists that we feel can lead them to a more meaningful stage of existence after the prolonged youth full of sound and fury. There is a motif of transcendence in the imagery of flying: will the balloons carry me or will they burst.

Niina, a single mother working for a small-town newspaper, is drawn into an investigation into the fall of a Soviet missile that upends her life and that of her small northern village.