Sign of the Beast

Construction worker Urho Suomalainen, his factory-worker wife Sirkka, and their two school-age children dream about getting away from their cramped rental apartment and moving to a house of their own. Urho decides to build one from scratch, starting from hauling trees from the forest to the sawmill. As the building progresses, a serious fault is discovered in its foundations. The family also has problems with their mortgage. Urho develops pneumonia and passes away before he sees his house completed. At his grave, a fellow worker gives a powerful speech praising socialism.

A lonely young suburban housewife participates in a radio interview survey while simultaneously engaging in an extramarital affair.

Semi-fictitious biopic of Finnish poet Eino Leino, made with a large budget to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. The film concentrates on his relationships with first wife Freya Schoultz and later muse, poetess L. Onerva. His friends include equally central figures of the Finnish cultural scene in the early 1900s, such as painters Halonen and Gallén-Kallela, and composer Sibelius.

Young photography model Susanna and her alienated teenage brother Veli spend the summer of 1969 travelling around Finland, mostly with another girl and her boyfriend. Sporting the latest fashions and trendy hairdos, they naïvely observe and criticise the modern consumer society, advertising, fancy boats and summer cottages, country dances, barbecues, and any other phenomena that were supposed to bother angry young intellectuals in those days. The plot and the political agenda are delivered with a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek mixture of documentary observations, fake TV commercials, fake interviews, philosophical voiceovers and titles, and a jazzy soundtrack by the progressive rock group Wigwam.

The main character is a miller, who sometimes acts strangely but is otherwise a goodhearted hardworking honest man. He sometimes keeps the villagers up all night by howling. Finally the villagers decide that the miller has to be committed into a mental hospital, where the hero does not have to spend too much time until he escapes. The miller takes to the woods near his home but there he is constantly harassed by the chief of the police with his posse.

The film is the first commission for the budding production company Filminor Oy, commissioned by the City of Tampere. Emphasising closeness to nature, the film showcases Tampere as an attractive summer city. Antti Peippo’s cinematography shifted a traditional city film towards a new wave visual narrative.

Baron Wilhelm von Tandem, CEO of the Tandem Corporation, gets mixed up with a spitting image of himself, an innocent country boy Kalle. Both characters conveniently amnesiac, they start living each other's lives and dating each other's girlfriends, succeeding in their new roles better than in their original ones. Level-headed Kalle soon spots the bad guys who are after the Baron's money, and the Baron brings innovative ideas to the countryside.