Jörn Donner

Acclaimed Finnish director Rauni Mollberg made several scandalous yet widely appreciated films. Former co-worker Veikko Aaltonen’s eye-opening documentary The Dinosaur looks at the relentless, often disturbing directing techniques behind Mollberg’s art and success.

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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.

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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.

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Eero’s career as an author is spiraling down: he just can’t get started with his new novel. The ambitious actor Pihla is about to get her international break. Neither of them is willing to sacrifice their career even though their relationship is doing worse than ever. Void is a comedy-drama about the price of success and the agony of failure, and about situations where your partner just doesn’t get it.

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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 The movie is based on two as yet unpublished TV interviews with Bergman which Donner filmed in 1975 and 1987.

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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.

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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.

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A restaurateur befriends a Syrian refugee who has recently arrived in Finland.

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Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was openly shot to death on a February evening 1986 on the streets of Stockholm. In one night, the country of Sweden was transfigured. “Palme” is about his life, his time, and about the Sweden he had created. About a man who altered history.

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Finnish Kerttu Nuorteva is spying for the Russians in Helsinki during World War II. She is arrested and interrogated in the hope that she will uncover the Soviet Union espionage tactics.

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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.

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Documentary about expeditions of Kai Donner to Siberia.

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Short documentary featuring interviews from the cast and crew of "Fanny and Alexander." Featured on the Criterion Collection box set of the film.

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This movie is about Iiris Vaara. She turns 30 and meets young director Marko. All dreams come true but does Marko share her dreams?

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Tracking missing socks in the European Union.

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TV Documentary about Ingmar Bergman from 1998.

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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.

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Minister Korkolainen happens to bump into his ex-girlfriend from years ago. They end up spending the night together, discussing the past and politics.

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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.

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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.

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According to Mänttäri, the film is about a woman as portrayed through four female characters.

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Nine Ways to Approach Helsinki, shot by Pirjo Honkasalo and Eero Salmenhaara, is a documentary on the capital of Finland.

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The concrete costs for culture and creativity is here illustrated in punchy images.

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A woman who has been raped by a man at a party plots and executes an elaborate and humiliating revenge.

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Lasse is a car salesman who has vowed to never get married. He wakes up hung over one morning with a wedding ring on his finger and a nude woman in his bed.

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Long-time cohabiting couple Petteri and Liisa wake up with a terrible hangover and realize to their horror that they got married the night before. Throughout the day, the couple argues and reminisces about their previous relationships, but by evening they are ready to reconcile.

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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.

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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.

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A story of a doomed young love in a small narrow-minded town.

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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.

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Eight vignettes on a variety of topics, including a baby growing up, Charlie Chaplin, Birgit Nilsson, the racing track at Le Mans, erotic cleanliness, French literature, and a black woman in a cupboard in the neighborhood of Farsta near Stockholm.

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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

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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.

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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.

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The young man must set up a clear border between Finland and Russia, white and red, enemy and friend, us and them. While the task seems clear he finds out the execution of his command in concrete situations is very difficult. Right choices turn out to be wrong ones and correcting them make things worse.

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Documentary about expeditions of Kai Donner to Siberia.

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In summer 1944 Finnish Karelia, Martta hastily marries Aarne before evacuating alongside newborn Hilkka’s family, Helmi Elisa and their grandmother as Soviet forces advance. Amidst chaotic retreat, the women struggle to stay united and fatefully intersect with Aarne and Arttu, but the relentless offensive exacts heavy suffering and loss on both civilians and soldiers.

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A heavily indebted construction entrepreneur robs a bank in Jakomäki, Helsinki. He takes two officers and one customer 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.

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Goodbye Gibraltar, directed by Ulrika Bengst, is a film about reconciliation, encountering different lifestyles and dreams.

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Finnish friends escape taxes to Florida.

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Johanna has fled Nazi Germany to visit a friend in Finland, and from there she continues on to her friend's family's estate. Once at the estate, Johanna passionately argues with her friend's pro-Nazi brother and at the same time, falls for the second, good-looking brother who shares her own anti-fascist feelings. The two are soon engaged in an active sexual relationship that continues as they travel north to an Arctic port.

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Minister Korkolainen happens to bump into his ex-girlfriend from years ago. They end up spending the night together, discussing the past and politics.

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Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.

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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.

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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.

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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 Strindberg's A Dream Play. She talks of her hatred for her mother, now dead, an alcoholic actress, who was Vogler's star and lover.

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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.

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Nine Ways to Approach Helsinki, shot by Pirjo Honkasalo and Eero Salmenhaara, is a documentary on the capital of Finland.

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The Swedish 19th century engineer Salomon August 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 never heard from again.

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Docudrama about the Soviet occupation of a Finnish village in the fall before the Winter War.

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A German artist in Spain decides to revenge the death of two Nordic tourists and to defend the strikers in a bloody conflict.

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Finland in the late 1950s. A touring theatre company travels the countryside and play English light comedies. But the audience fails.

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A woman who has been raped by a man at a party plots and executes an elaborate and humiliating revenge.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The film depicts the events surrounding the last public executions in Sweden.

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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.

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Paavo Mäkinen's alcoholism is hard on the whole family. His wife Terttu falls into depression and is hospitalized. Their children Marja, Tapsa, and Sanna each show symptoms in their own way: leaving home, drinking, skipping school. Will Paavo manage to stop drinking for the sake of his family?

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On the eve of the Finnish Civil War, the film follows the last days of Alfred Kordelin, the richest man in Finland.

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Lasse is a car salesman who has vowed to never get married. He wakes up hung over one morning with a wedding ring on his finger and a nude woman in his bed.

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The events surrounding a factory in a small town are gone through in documentary style.

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Long-time cohabiting couple Petteri and Liisa wake up with a terrible hangover and realize to their horror that they got married the night before. Throughout the day, the couple argues and reminisces about their previous relationships, but by evening they are ready to reconcile.

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A story about Marja Maronen, a 30-year-old office worker who is self-centered and pursues love and wealth. After her father's death, Marja is plunged into a crisis that shakes her entire life, the consequences of which are particularly reflected in her relationships and working life.

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A doctor, her daughter, and her young housekeeper spend their summer on a remote island.

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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.

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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.

Open details →

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.

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