Movies: Illume

Documentary about Finnish film theaters - about their past, disappearance and future. And at the same time universal story how cinema is undeniably connected with life....

Once upon a time there was a large Finnish company called Nokia that manufactured the world’s best and most innovative mobile phones. Nokia’s annual budget was larger than that of the Government of Finland and their phones spread everywhere and chang...

A film about the monster of Lapland, Mr. Lordi, who after winning the Eurovision Song Contest loses everything, almost everything....

A movie about two women who are mothers to the same child, and a child who belongs to two different worlds....

In the vast expanse of desert East of Atlas Mountains in Morocco, seasonal rain and snow once supported livestock, but now the drought seems to never end. Hardly a blade of grass can be seen, and families travel miles on foot to get water from a mudd...

This documentary follows a bustrip from Tallinn to Kaliningrad. A route that was so common in the Soviet times now passes through 4 different countries and crosses 3 different borders....

How to Fix the World? is a comprehensive and informative documentary about direct action in the 1990s and 2000s, directed by Jouko Aaltonen. In the documentary, anarchists, climate activists, and squatters openly describe their experiences and link t...

A little Nenets girl Neko is taken against her will from her home to a boarding school in a remote Russian village. Forced to adapt to a foreign culture and new customs, Neko rebels and decides to flee, hoping to get back to her family and old habits...

During the Continuation War, there were dozens of POW camps in Finland. About the third of 70,000 prisoners died during the first year of war. Most of the archives of the camps were destroyed and the majority of the war crimes were never revealed....

The action in the film takes place in the Far East, on an uninhabited island called Rikord in the Peter the Great Gulf of the Sea of Japan. The lead character, called Fatei after his father, and his family have their own marine farm where they harves...

The story of Agit Prop, communist band established in 1970....

A documentary film about Martta Koskinen, the last executed woman in Finland during the war in 1943. Martta was a Seamstress who lived in Helsinki during the Second World War. She was one of the post-civil war (in 1918) generation for whom the war h...

A documentary on the executions that took place during and after the Finnish civil war in 1918....

Director Lou Strömberg’s Filipino stepmother Yolanda is living in Sweden. She is being pressured for money by her sons back home who believe she lives in luxury. In reality Yolanda is working as a hotel cleaner. She struggles hard to provide a futur...

A sensitive and intimate portrait of Ivanna, a nomadic reindeer herder in the Russian Arctic and mother of five small kids. Ivanna is forced to leave the traditional way of life and emigrate to the city, following her own dreams, due to the quickly d...

Helsinki, Forever is a montage film about the city of Helsinki by the award-winning Finnish film director and academic Peter von Bagh. The film draws a portrait of Helsinki and also acts as an essay on Finnish culture in a wider sense. It shows Helsi...

A film about a woman who doesn’t exist. Moroccan Hind was raped and consequently denied an official identity – she has no other choice but to work as a prostitute and traditional wedding dancer, but despite the odds of her situation, refuses to give ...

In 1917 Finnish explorer Sakari Pälsi travelled to Northeastern Siberia carrying a cinematograph and 13,000 feet of film with him. The journey produced a unique documentary film and a travelogue. A hundred years later director Kira Jääskeläinen retur...

Peter von Bagh's documentary about Juhani Aho and people around him....

"Himmlers Kantele Player" - about Finnish student, who decides to leave University of Sorbonne and walk from Paris to Helsinki in the spring of 1935. On his way, in Germany, he meets Heinrich Himmler, who is attracted by a traditional Finnish instru...