Inuksuk

When two former top orienteers end up in a snowstorm in Lapland wilderness, they face an impossible orienteering task: how to reach your destination when you can't tell earth from sky?

A close and passionate look at the art of arctic peoples from the earliest findings to the beginning of the 20th century. “There are no talking heads, there is no dramatic lighting or sharp focus in these two long movies. Rather, each object is lovingly filmed, as if inviting the artwork to converse with us. Lehmuskallio has discovered how to let his camera speak to the art, and how to let the art reply, and thereby this northern art can speak with us as well.” (Kathleen Osgood, in Uralic Imaginations on Film)

Ethnographic documentary.

Story about life and death according to Chukchi people who live in Chukchi Peninsula as far in the East as one can go.

In 17th-century Pohjola, young Antti Puuhaara is looking for himself, because he has grown up with no knowledge of his childhood. Two actors, the tragedian and the comedian, who were banished from Tsarist Russia to Karelia, had predicted to the crooked merchant Markki Bohattov that Antti's fate would become intertwined with his own. When Antti falls in love with Bohattov's daughter Darja, the father has to arrange for her to marry the tar merchant Arho Mustahatu.

Based on a true story about the so called 1932 Horse Rebellion in Nivala, Finland. The decision to put down a sick horse owned by a poor farmer rises the farmers in open rebellion against the authorities.

An anthology of stories about the indigenous Nenet peoples of the Northern Russian tundra, and how their way of life was disrupted by the advent of Soviet power.

A documentary on the experiences of the Nubetya Yaptiks nomadic family in the Yamal Peninsula, Eastern Siberia, from 1992 to 2001.

Markku Lehmuskallio has devoted a large part of his documentary work to the indigenous people of the Arctic Circle. In this latest film, co-directed with his son Johannes Lehmuskallio, he composes a fascinating poetic ethnography inspired by the singing, dancing, forms of contemporary existence and, above all, the vital breath of these nomad communities mistreated by History.

With a keen sense of visual beauty, director Markku Lehmuskallio has created a thought-provoking, aesthetic film about a married couple and an old man living in a remote part of Finland. The young husband goes out hunting but only to support himself and his wife, not to kill off hordes of animals. He sets traps, and that gets him in trouble with the police who proceed to ticket him for using the devices. The forest cycles themselves are intimated when an old tree is shown falling to earth -- perhaps a reflection on the old man's passing years. In contrast to these few people living off the land and basically keeping the ecological balance intact, a highway construction crew is shown at work felling trees. Soon the antagonism grows between encroaching civilization and the quiet life of the young couple and elderly man.

Deaf artist Joel lives with his parents on a small farm, where he and his paintings are not appreciated.

The history of Finland through traces of the past.

Anna tells the story of a woman of the Nganasan, a severely endangered people of the Taymyr Peninsula.

A little Nenets girl Neko is taken against her will from her home to a boarding school in a remote Russian village. Forced to adapt to a foreign culture and new customs, Neko rebels and decides to flee, hoping to get back to her family and old habits.

Based on a novel by the late Finnish writer Timo Mukka, this simple story focuses on what happens when Milka (Irma Huntus), a girl barely out of childhood, gets pregnant by Ojanen (Matti Turunen) a rustic fieldhand. Her own mother had been hoping to marry Ojanen, and her daughter's pregnancy turns their lives around. Set in the Lapp country of northern Finland, the scenery is breathtaking, made even more so by the isolation of the region. A sense of natural solitude is underscored by a slow-moving dialogue interspersed with long silences, and the connection between nature and the dialogue is underscored as the young Milka recites poetry while out in the countryside. The fate of Milka and her mother, however, is connected to the decision that Ojanen makes at the end.