In “Finnish Blood, Swedish Heart,” Finland’s Mika Ronkainen, best known for his documentaries – 2003’s “Screaming Men,” 2009’s “Freetime Machos” – portrays the dislocation of 1970s Finnish emigrants in Sweden via a father-and-son musical road movie.
For “All the Sins,” a Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize entry written with Merja Aakko, Ronkainen takes very much the same elements – a genre, here the murder mystery; a near documentary depiction, here of small town bigotry; and cornerstone family relationships – and recasts them in a drama series, awash in a sense of (unmerited) shame and guilt, with a contemporary feminist turn. The result is a crime thriller which works on several levels.
“All the Sins” begins in classic Nordic Noir with a body winched upside down in a barn as a shadowy assassin draws a knife seemingly to dispatch the victim. But, diverging from the Nordic Noir playbook, we never see the corpse. After a ten-year absence,...
For “All the Sins,” a Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize entry written with Merja Aakko, Ronkainen takes very much the same elements – a genre, here the murder mystery; a near documentary depiction, here of small town bigotry; and cornerstone family relationships – and recasts them in a drama series, awash in a sense of (unmerited) shame and guilt, with a contemporary feminist turn. The result is a crime thriller which works on several levels.
“All the Sins” begins in classic Nordic Noir with a body winched upside down in a barn as a shadowy assassin draws a knife seemingly to dispatch the victim. But, diverging from the Nordic Noir playbook, we never see the corpse. After a ten-year absence,...
- 1/9/2019
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Bill Skarsgård, Cecilia Forss in Andreas Öhman's Simple Simon (top); Heikki Färm and Jani Kumpulainen's Steam of Life (bottom) Tirza, Simple Simon, Steam of Life, and Angel are four potential 2011 Academy Award contenders in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Those are, respectively, the submissions from The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Directed by Rudolf van den Berg after an eight-year hiatus, Tirza is a complex psychological drama in which a middle-aged Dutchman (Gijs Scholten van Aschat) comes unglued while attempting to find his missing daughter in Namibia. During his search he's befriended by a nine-year-old local girl who also happens to be a sex worker. Based on a novel by Arnon Grunberg, Tirza has received highly favorable reviews in the Dutch media. Whether the generally conservative Best Foreign Language Film-voting Academy members will go for the graphic dialogue and situations, the fragmented narrative (adapted by van den...
- 12/10/2010
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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