Tag Archive for: FFA 2025

Creaturama – Epic of the Animals

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Seven years deep in the northern woods. The camera was left alone—or maybe it never truly was. The animals lived as if it wasn’t there. Or because it was.

Creaturama is an experimental nature film where the human gaze steps aside and the forest begins to speak. It’s a journey into otherness and encounters beyond control. Built from tens of thousands of hours of trail camera footage, the film reveals the forest’s hidden rhythms with reverence.

There is no plot or narration. The story unfolds through the animals’ presence, movement, and gaze. A new cinematic language—silent, intuitive, and universal—emerges.

The sound design deepens the experience: nature’s symphony is gently pierced by distant jets or the faint buzz of chainsaws, reminding us of humanity’s reach.

Creaturama invites the viewer into a quiet, intimate world, offering a moment of shared existence across species. Can humans and animals, so different and yet connected, find understanding beneath the trees?

Abyss

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Aamu, a vagabond at heart, meets luminous Melissa and knows her life will never be the same again. She soon learns Melissa has a darkness inside her that she tries to fight off with drugs. Months later Melissa is taking her first steps to sobriety and the two lovers plan a future together in the heat of summer. When Melissa travels to visit her estranged children, Aamu shacks up at a friend’s house in the countryside and waits for her. To get by she does her usual hustle of buying and selling old valuables. That’s when she crosses paths with Sacha, a fierce young woman and a passionate affair blazes between them. Aamu tries to hold on to her and Melissa’s dream. What Aamu fails to see is her own darkness; a desperate craving to be loved that will drive her to the brink of an abyss and beyond. Aino Suni’s second fiction film is a heart-wrenching love story about lust, addiction and survival.

Runaway Brain

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Runaway Brain is a documentary film combining animation and creative documentary material, in which Nikke Liinamaa’s brain jumps out of his skull and sets off on an adventure through a drawn world. It is a world Nikke intuitively creates each day, like a visual diary. The journey of the brain passes through fantasies and happiness, into the depths of anger and depression, and returns to the light.

Nikke’s brain sees and expresses the world differently, partly because he has Down syndrome.The film is not a biography, but rather an associative trip into Nikke Liinamaa’s inner and outer world.

Nikke’s drawings offer the audience gentle ways to reflect on themselves and the world around them.

Jamila’s Children

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Directed by and starring Arezo, an Afghan-born filmmaker, this intimate documentary draws from deeply personal roots. The eldest of six siblings, Arezo was thrust into the role of guardian after the untimely death of their parents—while some of her brothers and sisters were still minors.

Set over the course of a single transformative year, the film follows the now-grown siblings as they navigate the friction between tradition and modernity, between inherited values and individual desires. As each charts their own uncertain path, tensions simmer, loyalties are tested, and bonds are redefined.

In one of its most powerful storylines, the film offers a rare and nuanced portrayal of a young man drifting toward radicalism—only to be pulled back by the quiet, steadfast presence of his family. With compassion and restraint, Arezo captures both the fragility and strength of kinship in a world marked by cultural crosscurrents.

Find Me

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Ada (24) returns as a social worker to the same youth home where she grew up. In the home’s dark hallways, Ada keeps encountering the visage of a familiar-looking young girl no one else can see — yet she can’t remember who the girl is, or why she keeps pleading with Ada for help. 

Soon, Ada realizes a darkness inside the home is taking the kids, and once they’re gone, no one can remember them. As Ada tries to understand everything she’s forgotten, she finally remembers who the young girl is: she’s Viktoria, Ada’s best friend when they were growing up in the youth home together. Until now, Ada had forgotten her friend’s existence.

Ada wants to save Viktoria and the kids living in the home now but everyone around her believes her traumatic background is causing her to lose her sense of reality. Ada thinks Viktoria can help her but she doesn’t know that the darkness living in the house and devouring the kids is wearing Viktoria’s face to lure Ada into a trap…

Northern Lights

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Lesya is a struggling performance artist, a Belarusian wannabe Marina Abramović. She unexpectedly finds her voice through politically charged performances amid the brutal anti-dictatorship protests in 2020. During a particularly radical show, riot police raid a gallery. Her gallerist and lover Yan is arrested, and Lesya is forced into exile.

In Finland, Lesya is celebrated, but the fame she always wanted is now tied to the label of “political exile.” Trapped in a role she didn’t choose, Lesya is torn between artistic authenticity and fame built on the exploitation of her trauma. Yearning to belong in the new world, she struggles with survivor’s guilt and jealousy of Yan, who gains recognition by using her legacy back home. 

Lesya’s frustration culminates during the Helsinki Biennale. She tries to reclaim her voice through deception, but the plan backfires. In a desperate attempt to salvage her life in Finland, Lesya joins a remote art residency in Lapland, where she finally reunites with Yan. Their joint performance becomes a transformative experience that leads to a breaking point for Lesya. By facing her deepest fears, she finally earns peace, true connection and a future.

Father’s Day

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Identical 13-year-old twin girls don’t know who their father is. They are done listening to their mother’s fairytales about their father and want to find him.

Their search leads to Tinke. He is an alcoholic living at a Salvation Army housing unit, helped by his best and only friend Veikko. Tinke is overjoyed by the prospect of becoming a father. Saimi, the mother, wants none of this. Veikko does not know what to do. Tinke’s health is turning from bad to worse and Saimi is pleading with him to stop the inevitable encounter from happening.

Tinke is played by an amateur and an alcoholic Tomi Lindfors.

The Offspring

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Henriikka and Arto, a middle-aged couple working in medicine, live a professionally successful life in Helsinki. Their connection is intellectual and financial and does not mean sharing a bedroom. Henriikka has a lover and Arto has a secret project with a connection to their shared history. Arto’s project suddenly takes them on an adventure to Lapland. Once there, this indulgent and urban couple is faced with new and erratic relatives. A romantic comedy about long marriages and delayed revelations.   

Secret Reading Club of Kabul

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In Taliban‑ruled Afghanistan, a small circle of young women risks everything to meet in secret and read banned books – from ‌ Anne Frank’s Diary‌ to ‌Michelle Obama’s Becoming‌.‌ Filming themselves with hidden phones, they reveal a life of defiance, humor, and friendship under constant threat. When “M” is hunted by a Taliban informant and forced to flee, her journey – and filmmaker Shakiba Adil’s support – links Kabul to exile. Even as repression tightens, their

“Secret Reading Club” survives online, proving the power of stories to unite, resist, and keep hope alive.‌ A raw, intimate blend of ‌covert phone footage‌ and ‌cinematic exile scenes‌. The film contrasts the grainy urgency of hidden diaries with the stillness and space of exile‌ – capturing both fear and resilience.‌

Alone With the Moon

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One night, lonely Emmi (17) finds a strange, bald teenager on their yard who claims to have lost their memory. Emmi takes them in, saying the guest is her online friend. They quickly develop a tight bond, and there’s no one else in the world for them. Soon, however, Emmi starts to wonder if the guest is actually human. Emmi would rather die than stay on her parents’ farm and romanticizes suicide, while the guest only wishes for one day of normal, average life. 

Alone With the Moon is magical-realist coming-of-age film about finding a life-changing friendship and new hope, mixing boring countryside teenage life with folklore and vampire stories. The film explores being an outcast, teenage isolation and hopelessness – unfortunately timely themes to this day. It’s set in a rural Finnish town in spring 2002, mostly on one farm and will be shot on rough 16mm film. 

Helsinki International Film Festival –
Rakkautta & Anarkiaa ry
Bulevardi 5 A 12
00120 Helsinki, Finland

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