The Chamber Stork

Katariina Lillqvist's puppet animation is a ballad about 18th century St. Petersburg, Catherine the Great's magnificent courtyard and the dim taverns of the suburbs.

Happened in Prague on a cold February evening, 1917: the poor violinist's atrium runs out of coal and his dancing mouse becomes ill. The coal bucket is empty, and without sparing any effort, the faithful bucket rides its master through the air towards the home of the carbon trader...

A strikingly realized puppet tale, based on an old folk ballad of a maiden who sets out to search for her lost fiancé in the turmoils of war. The beloved is found in a stationary hospital where the Grim Reaper is preparing for his gloomy task. It was inspired by the poem The Legend of the Dead Soldier by Bertolt Brecht.

An animation based on a short story by Franz Kafka about a country doctor interrupted by an alarm clock on a quiet home evening. In a bomb-ravaged room are waiting a dying child and a group of black market traders playing cards.

A praised war hero leaves his wife and finds a new love from Ural.

Mire bala kale hin, (which means the girl with the long black hair in Romanes) was the first TV programme ever produced as a childrens program about the Roma minority in Czech Republic. It is a co-production between Finnish/ Czech/Netherlands television. The story is about a Roma girl, who is told Roma stories, legends, dreams, fairy-tales and true stories. Beside the Czech and Finnish also an english version had been produced.

The year is 1936, and shoemakers in a Finnish industrial town are sending shoes to Spain as humanitarian aid. Young Arvo wants to do more, so he joins as a volunteer in the International Brigades and disappears.

Once upon a time, there lived an old matador in Barcelona, an unemployed and bitter man. The bullfights were forbidden, the arenas converted into shopping malls. In the end, the forgotten heroes earned their bread only by posing for Russian tourists.

The Song of the Gallows is based on a medieval, seventeenth-century story about a magic violin that saves the life of a Roma man from the gallows. The Polish princess Katarina Jagellonica arrives in Finland in order to get married to Duke Juhana; after listening to the Romani musician playing his instrument she agrees to his request that all the gallows should be torn down in the country to save the Roma from execution.

In a remote East European town, the evening bells can’t hide the cry of a hungry baby. His father, a street-musician named Baro, is also having a bad day. The social worker is blaming him on being a miserable parent, but Baro refuses to obey the advice of the worker: he definitely won’t put his little one into the BabyBox.