Rare Exports

I´m not a big fan of Finnish film industry and the last time I went to see a finnish movie in a theater was almost ten years ago. Yesterday we decided to go and check out Rare Exports and damn did my hopes for the better Finnish films increase a lot!

Yes, yes, it´s the different kind of Christmas movie and it has all the elements that a good fantastic film needs! The basic idea is excellent: Coca Cola did not invent Santa or "Joulupukki" that refers more to a goat than a red hooded fellow with sales on mind. Film is trying to avoid cliches and in places where it drifts to these territories it has a different angle.

Rare Exports is combination of horror images, ruffness of Lappland life, extremely beautifull landscapes, a real dramatic course with simple reasoning and therefore genuine feeling of alive people and fantastic sequences of imagination. But the greatest thing is the cast! These actors are definately the greatest that are available in Finland at the moment and Tommi Korpela leads the pack!

I remember years ago when I saw the Maximillian Tarzan and Ukkonen short movies and thought that it would be extremely good thing to let these guys to direct feature films. I was however convinced that it would never happen due to local film industry being driven by such a scheme that was concentrated on copying basic dramatic lines from international blocbusters and avoiding own ideas. It was kind of like the local music industry suffering years of "iskelmä" based music and supporting classical training in, for example singing.

Now that we are seeing movies made in internet (Star Wreck, Iron Sky) and the technique coming closer to the everyday users hands I´m hopefull that the big screen films would get competition from enthusiastic hobbyists that would throw all the assumptions to trash bins and do lots of low budget movies that would be out of the box and have some really fantastic elements tied to them. And form the local and fresh viewpoint too!