Forgetting Lenin

When Finnish-Somalian Mustafe discovers his ancestors’ land in the horn of Africa is full of copper and gold, he decides to swap his family’s safe but boring life in the Nordics for Somaliland, a self-declared state in East Africa. As Mustafe struggles to lift the treasures from underground, his children embark on a bumpy journey to uncover where they really belong.

Teenager Ved comes from a violent home in the Mumbai slums. When he joins a project aiming to foster healthy masculinity, he begins to realise there may be a brighter path for his future than the one paved by his abusive, controlling father. One of Ved's mentors is Harish, a gentle man in his 50s who has dedicated his life to abolishing toxic masculinity. Through the support Ved gets, he takes his first wobbly steps into adult life while developing an unlikely new passion: dancing. Boys Who Like Girls is a coming of age story set in the aftermath of the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape and the rise of the #MeToo movement. The world is in the midst of furious discussion about gendered violence and what it means to be a man. Will Ved's generation of boys be the first that actually likes girls?

With the Soviet Union’s dissolution dragging down the economy of neighboring Finland, the Scandinavian country was plunged in a period of protracted recession. And with no recovery in sight, a soap opera offered Finns a respite from the grim reality; the debut of The Bold and the Beautiful on television quickly amassed a vast and dedicated following, whereas the arrival of American idols in the country, on tour, elicited unprecedented frenzy.

Puolanka, a tiny village in Northern Finland is famous for its population decline, but also for its dark sense of humor about it. As the long summer evenings stretch out, teenage boys celebrate their new driver’s licences by endlessly circling the same few streets, while an older generation of local gents, proudly known as The Parliament, has already parked itself permanently at the petrol station café. Here, hunting and the legendary “Pussy Rally” aren’t taboos but badges of cultural identity. The only mystery that seems unsolved: where have all the women gone?

Jasmin gazes in delight at the screen of the laptop she uses to make video calls with her father in faraway Somaliland. She asks him if there are hedgehogs there—an important question, because soon she and her brother and sisters will be living there. Her father once fled the war in his native Somaliland. In Finland, he found a second home, and his four children were born there. But he missed Somaliland, and was tired of the racism in Helsinki, so he decided to return with his family.