Sari Havas

A trio of American students vacationing in Finland cross the border into the USSR and are soon imprisoned following a skirmish with Soviet soldiers.

Jukka, 13, is coached in photography by his openly gay art teacher. With his dead father's old camera, Jukka sees Johanna, a beautiful girl in her early twenties being physically abused by her stepfather. With the help of the local fire department, Jukka comes to her rescue. He quickly befriends the girl who works in a nearby supermarket, claims to become her manager and enters her in a beauty contest.

Looking to outrun the horrors of his past, a tormented cabbie flees Helsinki for an apartment complex in the suburbs, only to discover that new neighbors bring new problems. What ensues is a raw, realistic tragedy with an unwaveringly humane core.

The Tough Ones tells a story of two friends who have a hard time finding their place in the society. Antti and Jussi are released from jail. While they were doing time for bank robbery, the third man involved in the robbery, the one who was not convicted, has become a policeman. He tries to help his friends to settle into the small town in Pohjanmaa, but the boys start a black market liquor business instead. The road seems to lead back to the jail.

Viltteri, a balding guy in his thirties living in rural northern Finland, is hopelessly clueless about his new role as a married man and the father of a newborn son. A perfect escape from family responsibilities is having to get his old Hillman Minx repaired and inspected for road-worthiness, with a little help from an eccentric bunch of friends who never seem to have grown up either.

During the Continuation War, mother Kaarina and son Erkki live at home in a small town while father has been sent to the front. One day the family's life is turned upside down when the father returns home as a deserter from the front .

Reima Elo ends up trying to commit suicide when he is abandoned by his wife Molla. He is also the village's laughing stock due to his communism. At a critical moment, a Lenin lookalike from Russia named Vladimir rescues him.

Like it or not, almost anyone who has met a really serious poet finds that they have something about them which sets them apart from other people. It's not just a romantic legend. In wry but basically directionless Finnish movie, Paavo Pentikainen plays one of these ungainly beings, a man whose last published work is decades in the past, who probably hasn't written anything in years, but who still has an uncanny knack for precise observation, "pinning the tail on the donkey" almost every time. In the movie, the poet, accompanied by his young assistant, takes a minor celebrity's swaggering tour of small cultural centers and retirement homes.