The Novelist

A story about the conflicting emotions of love and hate, duty and selfishness in the human mind.

Two completely different people meet on a journey from Helsinki's West Harbor to the Arctic Ocean.

The pragmatic, reserved and refined Maigret investigates murders in his singular unhurried manner and inevitably discovers the truth.

A hospital room drama in which women talk about love, children, relationships with men, and life in general. Stories of survival are seasoned with both tears and laughter.

A story about the rise of awareness among the youth against the pollution and eco-system disaster. The conflict between the youth and ruling establishment is also taken under the inspection. The daughter of the prime minister and her relation to the son of another minister of opposing party is especially under surveillance.

On the eve of the Finnish Civil War, the film follows the last days of Alfred Kordelin, the richest man in Finland.

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.

Tells the story of young Anja, a teenage girl living in an approved school (otherwise known as a reform school), and the problems she faces in the outside world after running away.

Bridge engineer Akseli Jaatinen arrives to stir up the lives of the inhabitants of a small Finnish village. Jaatinen is well-liked at the bridge construction site, but he quickly finds himself clashing against the local decision-makers. The bridge engineer is also popular with the ladies and, being a man of energy, he manages to take care of several of his admirers at once.

A political drama set in the fictional country of Illyria between 1943 and 1945, the story is about the assassination of a leading politician. The country, an ally of Nazi Germany, is on the verge of being annexed to the Eastern Bloc. Kaurismäki's TV adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) tells the story of Hugo (Matti Pellonpää) who has just been released from prison. Before going to prison, he has worked as a journalist at his party's newspaper. This timid journalist, who uses the pseudonym Raskolnikov, wants to advance in his career and gets his chance when Hoederer (Sulevi Peltola), the leader of the party, has to be eliminated.

Manillaköysi is a cult status holding TV-movie adaptation of the satirical war novel by Veijo Meri. Manillaköysi has an endless list of classic one-liners, but it is still not based on cheap laughs or anything like that. The whole humouristic aspect of it comes from describing the absurdity of war, and the whole military system, by looking it with the eyes of a simple man, who's thrown into it, and who simply does not give a rats ass of it all. The tone of it is not overly preachy or moralizing. If I would have to describe it with one word, it would be: unglamourizing. The main point of Manillaköysi is pretty much compressed in one of the most famous quotes of it: There is nothing supernatural about war, it is just work like anything else.

The young man must set up a clear border between Finland and Russia, white and red, enemy and friend, us and them. While the task seems clear he finds out the execution of his command in concrete situations is very difficult. Right choices turn out to be wrong ones and correcting them make things worse.

A story about love. A famous singer cannot let go of the memory of her late husband. She befriends a man her own age, and there should be nothing standing in the way of their happiness.