Helmi Donner: The Lightning Rod (Finland, 2025, 21 min)
Finland’s contribution to this year’s Cannes Film Festival can be found in La Cinef competition, presenting the brightest and best of film school submissions. The Lightning Rod is Helmi Donner’s Master’s diploma work in film direction for Aalto University in Helsinki.
Irina (Oksana Lommi) and her daughter have fled domestic violence, seeking refuge with Irina’s grandmother (Janina Berman). From a generation forced to weather any storms, Grandma seems to drown any semblance of sympathy in tinkering around the house. The severe wind takes out the power and the little house in the woods seems to just be waiting for the monster to appear.
Winding the tension to its limit with the effective teamwork of sound and image, the film reminds us that darkness is part of light design and sometimes the greatest dangers are found right at home. Still, it’s always good to have a little dance.
Original name: Matalapaine. Language: Finnish, subtitles in English
Veera Lamminpää: Fish River Anthology (Finland), 2025, 10 min)
In many years, the Awards Ceremony of the Tampere Film Festival sets out the path for the Finnish short film of the year. This was also the case this March, when director Veera Lamminpää got to take the stage a total of five times, most notably to collect the 10 000 euro Risto Jarva Prize. Two weeks later, she won the Jussi Award for Best Short Film.
Fish River Anthology is a skilful animated musical, where an after-hours supermarket seafood counter grows into a fatalistic allegory of society and an existential treatise on mortality. The impressive score is composed by Iiti Yli-Harja, an award-winning filmmaker in her own right, who also joins the fishy (sic) choir together with some familiar names (such as Mari Rantasila and Mika Rättö). These river-dwellers have also swum up the festival circuit, getting to sing to audiences in dozens of film festivals around the world.
Original name: Mereneläviä. Language: Finnish.
Fabian Munsterhjelm: Pantyhose (Finland, 2024, 15 min)
Lauded last year for his feature fiction Apple Thieves, Samppa Batal stars with Satu Tuuli Karhu (who also won the Jussi Award for Best Supporting Actor for said feature) in Fabian Munsterhjelm’s compact chamber drama Pantyhose, co-written by Batal and Munsterhjelm.
Matti and Jonna are leaving for a gala, Matti already with a victory speech in his pocket. The phone pings; their ride to fame awaits. But then, disaster strikes: A hole in Jonna’s pantyhose. This begins the unravelling of a relationship dynamic on a scale from blissful social media photos to a complete breakdown and back again.
The viewer can only admire the preparation demanded by this emotional scale captured with only a couple of shots and precise choreography. This is short film art at its finest: Knowing how to present in fifteen minutes something that more loose-handed filmmakers would take hours to get across.
Original name: Sukkahousut. Language: Finnish.
Khadar Ayderus Ahmed: The Earth Has Ears (Somalia, 2025, 13 min)
Finnish-Somali screenwriter-director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed (later based in Paris) became a top name of the African diaspora with his debut feature The Gravedigger’s Wife that won awards around the world and gained Somalia’s official Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. While waiting for his next feature, we get to see his new short film which revisits the gravedigger theme from a somewhat different angle.
When men take up arms to go against their brothers, women have to take up gravediggers’ shovels. Ceebla (Fardouza Moussa Egueh, who we also saw in Gravedigger’s Wife), refuses to bargain for the cost of her labour. When her grave finally finds a taker, the revenue logic takes an unexpected twist.
The Earth Has Ears is a civil war film without gunfire. It shows how the absurdity of war also turns everyday life at the home front irrational.
Original name: Dhulku Dhago Leh. Language: Somali, subtitles in English
Marjo Levlin: Underdog (Finland, 2024, 30 min)
Marjo Levlin may not be widely known as a film-maker, but she has been working as a visual artist since the 1990s, winning the prestigious Risto Jarva Prize at the 2021 Tampere Film Festival – held online due to the pandemic – with her experimental documentary Ellipsis. Linking that film and Underdog, this year’s winner of the Main Prize of the National Competition in Tampere, is a reflection on the relationships, representations and expectations concerning humans and other animals.
A two-channel video artwork in black and white, Underdog focuses on the human-dog axis, delving into issues such as value hierarchies and conceptions of race. Levlin links everyday observations to larger issues through archive materials and scientific research, associatively weaving her path from one place and time to the next. As the National Competition Jury put it: “A masterwork of sensitivity and courage, this film embodies cinema at its most poetic and profound”.
Language: Swedish, Finnish
Liina Härkönen
Duration 89 min.