Alma Koskela

Based on the novel by Väinö Linna, the story takes place during the time of the Finnish Civil War.
2009-12-04
6.4
5.8When their bootlegging father ends up in jail, four twenty-something brothers need money to pay his debts to local crooks. Next, their 9-year-old half-sister is dumped on their doorstep by her prostitute mother. A karaoke set helps reveal that the little girl is quite a singer, just as a talent contest for children is coming up on national television offering more than enough money to the winner.
7.9What drove a company of American soldiers – ordinary young men from around the country – to commit the worst atrocity in American military history? Were they “just following orders” as some later declared? Or, did they break under the pressure of a vicious war in which the line between enemy soldier and civilian had been intentionally blurred? American Experience focuses on the 1968 My Lai massacre, its subsequent cover-up, and the heroic efforts of the soldiers who broke ranks to try to halt the atrocities, and then bring them to light.
7.4“Re-Existence” is a documentary about migration stories of individuals from the Brazilian queer community.
7.4Ana and Helen, two divorced women, were close friends as teenagers. Today, amidst the corona virus pandemic and in quarantine, they get in touch after 20 years via internet. Through video conference calls, memories, sensations and emotions reflourishes.
7.7The first rule is that there are no rules. For the bare-knuckle combatants competing in Musangwe fights, anything goes - you can even put a curse on him. The sport, which dates back centuries, has become a South African institution. Any male from the age of nine to ninety can compete. We follow a group of fighters as they slug it out in the ring. Who will be this year's champion?
5.8Photographer Grigory Yaroshenko gets a chance to visit Antarctica and learn about the life of polar explorers. But his wife is expecting their second child, and life changes. Gregory is faced with the question of male self-identification and acceptance of new family circumstances.
7.4A documentary film depicting five intimate portraits of migrants who fled their country of origin to seek refuge in France and find a space of freedom where they can fully experience their sexuality and their sexual identity: Giovanna, woman transgender of Colombian origin, Roman, Russian transgender man, Cate, Ugandan lesbian mother, Yi Chen, young Chinese gay man…
6.0This five part epic war drama gives a dramatized detailed account of Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany during world war two. Each of the five parts represents a separate major eastern front campaign.
5.6This Best Short Subject Academy Award winning film begins in the spring of 1940, just before the Nazi occupation of the Benelux countries, and ends immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It chronicles how the people of "Main Street America", the country's military forces, and its industrial base were completely transformed when the decision was made to gear up for war. Original footage is interspersed with contemporary newsreels and stock footage.
6.0Five years after a zombie outbreak, the men and women of R-Division hunt down and destroy the undead. When they see signs of a second outbreak, they fear humanity may not survive.
7.6This direct-to-draw animated film on 35 mm film features the imagery of 10 European directors in a collective project. Each produced 1 minute of animation on film, drawing directly onto it in his or her own style.
6.4Seventeen-year-old Vera earns money by secretly renting out an apartment to teenagers seeking privacy, all while eavesdropping from behind a closed door. As she listens, her own desires awaken.
6.2A plane containing a highly classified government project crashes outside of a small town in the US. Realizing the level of danger, the government tries to secretly fix the problem. As tensions grow, the situation gets out of control, and civilians from the town find themselves facing their worst nightmare: a genetically enhanced killing machine that doesn't know how to stop.
6.4Four friends head off to Bombay and get involved in the mother and father of all gang wars.
6.4Jimmy is the kid everybody ignores and uses. One day, he gets into a freak accident. The only way for him to survive is a brain transplant. He gets the brain of Milt Appleday, a famous cartoon creator. And when he wakes up, he can see cartoons!
6.2After inheriting the family mortuary, a pyrophobic mortician accidentally exposes hundreds of un-cremated bodies to toxic medical waste. As the corpses re-animate, the mortician's inheritance-seeking younger brother unexpectantly shows up, stumbling upon a full zombie outbreak!
6.9At the turn of the century, all of the Earth's monsters have been rounded up and kept safely on Monsterland. Chaos erupts when a race of she-aliens known as the Kilaaks unleash the monsters across the world.
5.7Divers go to work on a wrecked ship (the battleship Maine that was blown up in Havana harbour during the Spanish-American War), surrounded by curiously disproportionate fish.
6.0A Bombay police officer seeks revenge when his brother is killed by a powerful underworld figure. Things get complicated when a matinee movie idol begins to tag along the policeman so he can research a movie role.
6.8The year is 2163. Starship Ikaria XB 1 embarks on a mission deep into space in search of alien life. During their perilous journey the crew confront the effects of a malignant dark star, the destructive legacy of the 20th century and, ultimately, the limits of their own sanity.
7.0The background to and depiction of a watershed battle in Japanese history, at Sekigahara in 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu's Army of the East defeated the Army of the West of Ishida Mitsunari. The story includes the intrigues and shifting loyalties of the various retainers, family members, and samurai.
5.0Paul Clark and his children are still heartbroken a year after the death of Jane, Paul's wife. When he unexpectedly falls in love with Mary, a former tennis-player, the couple decide to marry and live together. However, their lifestyles are completely different, and Mary is continuously reminded of the deceased Jane.
7.0A chronicle of the crimes of Ted Bundy, from the perspective of his longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, who refused to believe the truth about him for years.
5.7A story about art and educated men, and how their art and culture reveal themselves useless in the face of the harsh realities of the 20th century life.
6.6A 17th-century nun becomes entangled in a forbidden lesbian affair with a novice. But it is Benedetta's shocking religious visions that threaten to shake the Church to its core.
1.0Goro is an archeologist, fascinated with the national treasure Gassho clay figure and remains from the Jomon period. He meets a woman, Momoko who is timid with love. Momoko often has memories from ancient times and landscapes of the heart in her dreams. She tells Goro about her dream and their relationship deepens.
5.5Based on an 1884 novel by Julius Stinde, it is a family chronicle set in late nineteenth century Berlin.
6.5When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy. Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs, to join her. The unlikely pair and the three women head east, where a waiting minister and his wife have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.
6.5An old woman has died and her widower with dementia confesses to killing her. After this, the story goes back in time to show the events leading up to her death.
4.5Jess Koster is a young attorney in Los Angeles, who is being stalked by the serial killer she is prosecuting.
5.3The doomed love of a city girl caught in the vise of poverty is detailed in Vavra’s fluid, romantic work, one of the most elegant creations of the Czech Modernist era... The film lingers over its characters’ habitats and haunts, finding psychological truths in what each owns or desires, and countering every Hollywood-ready scene of gleaming restaurants and dazzling penthouses with realist moments of employment lines and crammed flats. Vavra’s classical camerawork and aura of romantic defeatism give Virginity a force comparable to the master of this genre, Hollywood’s Frank Borzage. (BAM/PFA)
6.0After fourteen years in Japan a small-time crook returns to his hometown.
7.1Following the brutal rape and murder of his 16-year-old daughter, Sang-hyeon stumbles into an ever-widening conspiracy of rage, revenge, and murder.
A group of wealthy American Jewish businessmen have been captured by the SS and are told that they are to be traded to the American army for several SS officers. However, these hostages are being required to pay bribes for their "transportation costs." In order to ensure that the businessmen will be more cooperative in paying up, a beautiful female singer is placed in their midst as a bargaining chip. The group of hostages are then placed on a train which is supposed to take them to the ship that will deliver them to freedom, but a series of "mishaps" delays their escape.
6.5A ruffian sends his assistant to force a peasant girl to marry him, but while he is bringing her to him, he falls in love with her.
6.2A story of lost love, young love, a legendary sword and one last opportunity at redemption.
4.7Pedro Jarrapellejos is a ladies man who cannot turn the heads of Isabel or her beautiful daughter. When both peasant women are found raped and murdered in a brutal scene, a schoolteacher is falsely accused. Pedro knows his own nephew and his friend participated in the killings, but he uses his considerable influence over the police and courts to intimidate the witnesses into silence.
5.7A doctor, who commits malpractice in a major urban hospital, retreats to a remote house in the countryside. Although he is acquitted, his conscience is not so easily appeased. When a murder occurs and the southern Styria village searches for the culprit, he has to take a stand.
5.5Based 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.