Jörn Donner
Jörn Donner’s entire production can be considered as a self-portrait, a life-spanning performance. Whilst others have painted one image or another of Donner, John Webster’s interpretation differs in that it pulls most of its material from Donner’s last-intended interview in December 2019, and an immense never-before-seen collection of photographs from albums simply labelled “Donner – Privat”. As a result, the film morphs into an epilogue of sorts, of Donner’s life story.
Known for his sharp tongue and controversial statements, Jörn Donner has been an important cultural personality in Sweden and Finland since the fifties. Author, film director, film producer, journalist, critic and politician. Jörn Donner is known for producing Fanny and Alexander and received an Oscar for it. But he has also been known for being bellicose and naturally he fights with the filmmakers Alberto Herskovits and Olavi Linna as they try to film him. He is especially cantankerous when they ask him to do something in front of the camera that he finds inane. He doesn’t want to prostitute himself anymore, he wants to talk! This desire provides a key to this quick-witted man’s incessant restlessness and his quarrels stand as a backdrop that facilitate the dialog Donner wants to have.
In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman the Finnish writer and director Jörn Donner shares his memories of his friend and collaborator. The movie is based on two as yet unpublished TV interviews with Bergman which Donner filmed in 1975 and 1987.
In „Fuck Off 2“, Donner waxes sarcastic about the scourges in Finnish society by interviewing regular people. The film takes a theme of different living possibilities. Some people find happiness, others succumb to depression. Many still dream of a better life somewhere else. Donner himself undergoes cardiac surgery.
Harry Schein was an anomaly in Swedish cultural society. Equal parts playboy, intellectual, and political visionary, his life story could very well be the foundation of a Hollywood film. Citizen Schein is a film about a refugee who refused to look back, a film about powerful men, and the myths that fuel them.
A restaurateur befriends a Syrian refugee who has recently arrived in Finland.
Armi Ratia is the woman behind the legendary design company Marimekko and a worldwide celebrity. A theatre company has taken on the task of trying to portray the life and work of this complex person. The sets mainly consist of the well-known patterns that we all have grown to love. Armi is a brave, risk-taking businesswoman and her passion for her company repeatedly takes its toll on her employees, finances and family. The company grows while Armi's personal life is shaken by suicide attempts and turbulence. In Armi Alive!, Oscar-nominated film producer and director Jörn Donner portrays a fascinating woman with fervent ideas about the new Finnish man, her company, fabrics and clothes.
Nuori nainen on saanut kutsun saapua poliisin kuultavaksi. Hän pelkää joutuvansa ansaan. Hän on täydellistä suomenkieltä puhuva Neuvosto-desantti, joka on varomattomuuttaan jättänyt vakoiluradionsa pesulaan säilytettäväksi.
Taking sauna is the Finnish people's national obsession, so there are two of the per five Fins, and they build theme everywhere, even on military operations and aboard vessels, but preferably near a lake, to dive in even on ice days, with trees to cut whisking birches from. Weekly, usually on Saturday, is considered a hygienic minimum, daily the good life, especially in summer and holidays. It's a family and/or social activity, relaxing and removing social barriers, but also linked to sports and all kinds of bonding.
Short documentary featuring interviews from the cast and crew of "Fanny and Alexander." Featured on the Criterion Collection box set of the film.
A heavily indebted construction entrepreneur (Tom Pöysti) robs a bank in Jakomäki, Helsinki. He takes two officers (Jonna Järnefelt and Stina Rautelin) and one customer (Dominic Landon) hostage from the bank. In addition to himself, the desperate robber threatens to blow up the hostages if the police who left to follow them try to prevent the escape.
Goodbye Gibraltar, directed by Ulrika Bengst, is a film about reconciliation, encountering different lifestyles and dreams.
Uuno Turhapuro becomes the President of Finland. Streets are named after him and honorary companies are arranged for him. He also tries to turn Finland into a kingdom.
Lasse is 40 years old and sells used cars. Lena is 28 and working partner in an exclusive hairdressing salon. On this particular Saturday, Lasse wakes up at the wrong end of a bed. He has a ring on his finger. Did he get married? What happened?
The director of one of Finland's largest company, United Metal, discovers the company's Chairman dead in the office. A chain of bribes unravels.
In this melodrama about love in wartime, Angela (Ida-Lotta Backman) is a Finnish nurse in Lapland who begins a torrid affair with Thomas Schmidt (Mathieu Carriere), a wounded German army captain. Their love for each other is verboten in Finland, where the Germans occupy northern Lapland until the end of the war. Finland had formed a brief alliance with Germany to fight an invading Russia in the winter of 1939, but when the Russians won that battle and took more than 16,000 square miles of land away from Finland, it was too late to successfully rout the Germans from Finnish soil. So for the entire war, the Finns were fighting Germany on their own national territory -- which makes the love affair between a Finnish nurse and German soldier a very complex issue. While Angela receives different reactions from her friends, acquaintances, and relatives, she continues on with her love for the German, against odds which are greater as time goes by.
Rational, exacting, and self-controlled theater director, Henrik Vogler, often stays after rehearsal to think and plan. On this day, Anna comes back, ostensibly looking for a bracelet. She is the lead in his new production of Stindberg's "A Dream Play." She talks of her hatred for her mother, now dead, an alcoholic actress, who was Vogler's star and lover. Vogler falls into a reverie, remembering a day Anna's mother, Rakel, late in life, came after rehearsal to beg him to come to her apartment. He awakes and Anna reveals the reason she has returned: she jolts him into an emotional response, rare for him, and the feelings of a young woman and an older man play out.
Hockeyfeber tells not only the story of collisions on the ice , but also about life as it really fortoner in the tough environment amateur sport unfolding in . The film depicts the sporting community for better or worse , and shows how tough and cynical demands of athletes being when the sponsors' affection, the most important.
As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.
The Swedish 19th century engineer S. A. Andrée sets out to become the first man on the north pole. His idea is to launch a polar expedition using a hydrogen balloon, together with two friends. The balloon, "The Eagle", takes off from Svalbard in 1897, but the three men are not heard of again.
Nine Ways to Approach Helsinki, shot by Pirjo Honkasalo and Eero Salmenhaara, is a documentary on the capital of Finland.
Docudrama about the Soviet occupation of a Finnish village in the fall before the Winter War.
Finland in the late 1950s. A touring theatre company travels the countryside and play English light comedies. But the audience fails.
It is 1957. A young student is unhappy at school, play hooky frequently and devotes himself to his great interest in music. Together with his girlfriend and other friends he lives a bohemian life in anticipation of becoming an adult.
Solidarity with the border people. Equal rights for the sexual deviants. Kristoffer Lohman is a young solicitor who collects stories and knowledge of different perversions. This has affected and changed his own sexual life. Sara, a young well-behaved and adorned woman, becomes interested in Kristoffer's activity.
Harri is one of Sweden's many Finnish immigrant-workers. While in Sweden, the illiterate Harri marries and has a child. After accidentally killing a man in a fight, he flees back across the border to Finland and begins to pick up the pieces of his life, but soon, the police come looking for him.
"Three Scenes with Ingmar Bergman" is quite an interesting documentary which is basically a sequence of interviews with Ingmar Bergman where Bergman himself talks about his life and work, beginning with his birth and childhood, relationship with his parents, particularly with his father, which had influence on his work later. Then he talks about how he became writer and than director at Film Studious in Stokholm and about the movies he made during this period. Then he describes how he discovered the island of Faro and come to live and work there later. Particularly interesting because of it's autobiographical aspect: we see Ingmar Bergman´s life and how he made his films through his own eyes and described with his own words.
Mania is a new employee at a mental hospital, where she meets a young man with mutism. He gets her to realize that it is a fluid boundary between being healthy and being regarded as sick.
The film depicts the events surrounding the last public executions in Sweden.
Romantic Memoirs/Hangover is about a Saturday in Larry and Lena's ordinary life. Larry is in his 40s and is a used car salesman. Lena, 28, works as a hairdresser. One day, Larry wakes up with a ring on his finger– something he promised himself never to do. He could never live a monogamous lifestyle. This is Larry's story, on marriage and the beauty of life as a single man.
On the eve of the Finnish Civil War, the film follows the last days of Alfred Kordelin, the richest man in Finland.
F*** Off! shows no false respect towards the authorities in its impudent and candid reportage of the developing country/welfare state Finland. It is a cinematic parallel to Donner's New Book of Our Land (1967). The travelogue focuses especially on Finland's outsiders, low-paid workers and the unemployed. In desolate provinces, the inhabitants of a cold and barren country either humbly abide their fate, choose to move to Sweden or take refuge in excessive drinking. These images are accompanied by protest songs based on Donner's own prose and the lyrics of poet Jarkko Laine. Perkele is embodied in big business and the political elite.The jagged (anti)aesthetics of the film correspond to the underground movement and the radical politics of the time. The camera agilely penetrates everyday life. Though opposed to censorship, Fuck Off! itself transgresses the boundaries of privacy.
Finnish porn movie producer Pertsa returns from America to his home country to continue his profession with hopelessly small budgets and incompetent casts and crews. A self-ironic satire about director Donner's scandalous fame in late 1960s Finland, notorious for a graphic long shot of his penis pointing northeast.
Tuula's husband Jukka takes care of all domestic chores. Tuula seems to have no idea that her husband spends his evenings working as a major league ice hockey referee. She also finds out about his extra-marital affair with a female rally driver. In revenge, Tuula starts seeing her gynecologist Timo Paasi, a married man with six children.
Juha is a sales manager of a refrigerator company. His perfect-looking family and glittering array of modern kitchen appliances have just been featured in a magazine article, but in reality Juha is a womanising chauvinist more at home on the road than with his family.
Stimulantia is a 1967 Swedish anthology film comprising eight episodes by eight different directors including Ingmar Bergman, Jörn Donner, Gustaf Molander and Vilgot Sjöman and starring among others Ingrid Bergman, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Lars Ekborg and Inga Landgré.
Fashion Designer Anne must decide between Toivo, an architect ten years her senior, and French businessman, Jacques, with whom she's been living for three years.
A widowed woman undergoes a true sexual awakening in this provocative drama. The change comes after her husband of 10 years suddenly dies. During their marriage she never felt a thing during sex. Then she meets a lively Pole and begins an affair. Suddenly she finds herself feeling a great deal, and happiness ensues.
"A testimony about her." Her being the actor and vocalist Monica Zetterlund. At 25 in the beginning of her career. Monica sings with a trio at a concert. Returns to her empty home in Stockholm. Relaxes in loneliness. Next morning. An interview with writer Vilgot Sjöman. Then off to recording at a studio with the Phillips Recording Orchestra, featuring Jan Johansson on piano. Later a concert at Nalen in Stockholm.
A short documentary where Helsinki in the springtime is displayed in her poetic ugliness.
Helsinki wakes up to the summer morning in Jörn Donner's first short film, which goes through the landscapes of Katajanokka, Pohjoisranta, Market Square, Kruununhaka and Kallio
Everyone knew ‘public Jörn’, and a large number of people also knew ‘private Jörn’ as a friend, colleague, contemporary or family member. However, according to Jörn, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Last Interview that was made during four days in December 2019 includes exclusive material that gives us a new perspective into the life of this exceptional cultural and political giant.
