News

Stormskerry Maja, a sweeping period drama about a woman’s struggle for survival on a remote 19th-century island, was the big winner at the 2025 Jussi Film Awards, Finland’s equivalent to the Oscars, taking home six awards, including best film and best director for Tiina Lymi. The film’s star Amanda Jansson also took Jussi for best lead performance.

The Jussis were handed out at a gala ceremony in Helsinki on Friday.

Other top winners included Apple Thieves, Missile, My Name Is Dingo, and Once Upon a Time in a Forest, each earning two awards. Notably, this year introduced two new acting categories: ensemble of the year and breakthrough role of the year, reflecting the evolving recognition of performances in Finnish cinema. Additionally, the inaugural visual effects of the year award was presented, marking a milestone for technical achievements in the industry.

The prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, known as the “Concrete Jussi,...

With it being the 14th anniversary of the original Alan Wake today (flash back to Luiz’s article on the game’s 10th anniversary), Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games and Laced Records have a treat for fans with the release of the soundtrack from Alan Wake 2 today! The 35-track album, composed by Petri Alanko, is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and other major music services for streaming, as well as for purchase on iTunes, Amazon, and more.

Alanko, who also composed the original Alan Wake soundtrack, says that working on Alan Wake 2’s soundtrack was like “coming home”. “[Working on the soundtrack was] comparable to meeting old friends after so many years, seeing everything had changed a bit – and that longing feeling had its place among the building blocks of Alan Wake 2‘s soundtrack.”

“From a composer’s point of view, the soundtrack has no filler, with each musical cue emphasizing a certain sequence of events...

Netflix announced six new Nordic feature film productions at its Next on Netflix showcase in Stockholm on Monday.

The showcase, which followed similar events in Germany and London last week, gave updates on 26 titles across film and TV, including 12 new titles. For the new Nordic TV line-up, read here.

On the cinema front, new Nordic movies include an adaptation of the Key Series crime whodunnit books about Private detective Julia Stark, by Alex Ahndoril, the pseudonym for husband and wife writers Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril.

Working titled The Key Series, the debut feature-length instalment will see Julia Stark hired by a wealthy family to solve a murder been committed at their estate in the northwest of Sweden.

Banijay company Filmlance is lead producing. Casting and the delivery date has yet to be confirmed.

The platform is also getting behind Little Siberia from Finnish director Dome Karukoski, whose feature...

Alma Pöysti agreed to star in Fallen Leaves, Finland’s Oscar entry, before there was a script. It was enough to know that local directing legend Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past) wanted her for his latest working-class love story, playing Ansa, a shy and lonely supermarket shelf stocker who falls for Holappa, a construction worker, played by Jussi Vatanen.

How were you cast for this film?

I got a phone call that Aki wanted to meet for lunch. We met, and Jussi Vatanen, my co-star, was there as well. Aki presented this idea of the movie. There wasn’t a script yet, but he mumbled something about a love story. Then he wanted to talk about the forest and about growing vegetables and politics. All he said about my character was she worked in a store and the two of them would fall in love. We got the script a year later.

Early in Aki Kaurismäki’s slender but enormously satisfying Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet Lehdet), the male protagonist is invited by his buddy to go to Friday night karaoke. “Tough guys don’t sing,” he replies, in the signature affectless deadpan shared by all the Finnish master’s characters. But that tough guy turns out to be yearning for love, refusing to give up when a lost phone number and a series of other obstacles keep him from a woman he barely knows. In a sense the tough guy is also Kaurismäki himself, inhabiting a world defined by dourness and melancholy but always seeking pathways to comfort, hope and light.

The director had spoken of retirement after his beautiful Syrian refugee tale The Other Side of Hope in 2017, and this return after six years is waggishly described as a work previously believed to be lost. It’s an expansion of Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy,...