POMOR FILM
Feature Films - co-productions
THE SNOW QUEEN
Director: Taru Mäkele
Screenwriter: Raija Talvio
Genre: Romance, comedy, 100 min
Production companies: Kinosto, Finland, Pomor Film, Norway and Fogn´n desire films, Czech
ELSA (Kati Outinen), a middle-aged milliner and part-time clairvoyant runs a smart little hat-shop in the heart of Helsinki 1962. She has total control of her life-until the man she once loved and lost suddenly reappears from the past – and from the dead. JAN (Miroslav Etzler), is in town to perform at the Festival with his Czech dance orchestra. For more than two decades Elsa has believed the man to be dead. Initially, Elsa wants to stay away from Jan –and especially from the Festival, which for her is just another attempt by the International Communists to brainwash the good, unsuspecting citizens of Western countries, such as Finland. But Jan is persistent, persuasive, and charming. The intoxicating blend of hot August nights, music, dance and the ice-cold political paranoia of the Age of the Iron Curtain form the circumstances in which Elsa has to make her final choice. Will she yield to the wishes of the Finnish Police, who, under pressure from the KGB, wants her to track down a Czechoslovakian defector or will she opt for an entirely new life herself?
RUDOLF
Directors: Kjell-Åke Andersson
Screenwriter: Hans Gunnarsson
Genre: Comedy, drama
Somewhere Else takes place in an average Swedish small town. As the title implies the anonymity of the location plays a central roll in this murder story. The little society becomes a character in itself. Three people die in one night, somewhere in Sweden. Two burglars find a man dead in his kitchen, and they end up being blamed for his death. This leads to one of them getting shot. At the same time a woman is killed in a car accident. An unbelievable chain of events is set in motion after this night of death. The story unfolds episodically around people connected to the victims and the film is a tender portrayal of regular people in their everyday life. ...Somewhere Else
MAD SHIP - 2012
Directors: David Mortin
Screenwriter: David Mortin / Patricia Fogliato
Genre: Drama - 94 min
Production companies: Enigmatico Films / Buffalo Gal Pictures, Canada, Pomor Film, Norway
Mad Ship is the story of Tomas Sorensen, a Scandinavian immigrant to the Canadian prairies in the 1920s. He is a man of great passion and great integrity, who dreams of creating a family wheat dynasty in this new land of opportunity. He is also a man who is deeply in love with his beautiful wife, Solveig, and together they have a profound bond that sustains them. But prairie drought and the Great Depression conspire against them, and the family is brought to ruin when their crops are destroyed by a massive dust storm.
Facing foreclosure at the bank, Solveig suggests that they return to their homeland. But Tomas refuses to give up in Canada, too proud to return as a failure. He leaves Solveig and their two young children in search of work in a distant city, setting off a series of events that soon turn tragic.
Inspired by a true story.
Directors: Jalmari Helander
Screenwriter: Jalmari Helander
Genre: Fantasy/Thriller
Production Companies: Cinet, Finland, Pomor Film, Norway, Love Streams Agnes B. Productions, France, Davaj Film, Sweden
Drawing on ancient Scandinavian mythology, Jalmari Helander’s feature debut is a thing of frigid beauty and twisted playfulness. The time is just before Christmas, and the setting is northern Finland, where an American drilling operation has unearthed a mysterious block of ice sprouting a gigantic pair of horns.
Soon children from a nearby village begin to disappear, and a group of reindeer hunters finds its annual crop slaughtered in the snow. Only little Pietari (Onni Tommila) knows who’s responsible; now he must persuade his gruff father (Jorma Tommila, Onni’s father) to help him fight back.
RARE EXPORTS - a Christmas tale - 2010
REVOLUTION
Directors: Marko Raat
Screenwriter: Marko Raat
Genre: Romance, Drama, 95 min
Production companies: F-SEITSE, Estonia and Pomor Film, Norway
Marko Raat's film "The Snow Queen" is a wintry fairytale for adults. The unusual love story is based on the motifs of Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairytale. A woman (Helena Merzin) living in an ice castle lures a boy (Artur Tedremägi, an acting student at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre) to her. He becomes so spellbound by the woman and her land of ice that he forgets the real world. The woman hides the secret of why she is living in the cold from the boy. The film is a romantic drama about budding love between two people. Those, who remember H.C. Andersen's fairytale, will also remember that only a few lines spoke of the relationship between the boy and the Snow Queen. The question remained unanswered: what did the boy and the Snow Queen do in the ice castle for all of the time that the girl spent looking for the lost boy? This film talks about what Andersen didn't. In "The Snow Queen", the environment is extravagant and the relationships psychological and realistic.
AUGUST FOOLS - 2013
SOMEWHERE ELSE - 2011
THE SNOW QUEEN - 2010
Documentary Films -
REVOLUTION
Director: Stein Bjørn
Screenwriter: Stein Bjørn
Genre: Documentary, 55 min
Production company: Pomor Film, Norway
A film about the 20th anniversary of the indigenous RidduRiddu festival, which is a annual festival in northern Norway. Indigenous people from all over the world travel to this remote place to partake in the festival. Through the Norwegian minister of culture and the former festival leaders, the documentary explores the importance of the festival and what it stands for, which is tolerance, cultural diversity and acceptance. During the filming of the documentary, tragedy strikes as terrorist Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 people in Oslo and Utøya. One of the victims is the daughter of one of the former festival leaders. An act against multiculturalism, which the RidduRiddu festival stands for. Is festivals like RidduRiddu more important after the massacre?
Directors: Ann Coates
Screenwriter: Ann Coates
Genre: Documentary - 58 min
Production Companies: Pomor Film and Coates Productions, Norway
The Norwegian sailor and engineer Sigurd Coates used 20 years and all he had to build a 148 feet replica of the King Edward VII´s Yacht “Britannia”, in Archangelsk, Russia. A project that posed daunting challenges regarding the language barrier, cultural differences and technical issues. Finally, when a powerful businessman from Moscow attempted to take hold of “Britannia”, Coates’ only hope was to turn to the Russian courts. The monetary and personal costs of the project were enormous. The question asked in this documentary is whether the consequences of fulfilling a dream can be too high? Director Ann Coates tells the story of her brother’s passionate boat project.
THE DREAM OF BRITANNIA - 2013
REVOLUTION
Director: Knut Skoglund
Screenwriter: Knut Skoglund and Svein Andersen
Genre: Documentary - 51 min
Production company: Pomor Film
This documentary takes you onboard a sealer, - to the drifting ice-floes between the North Pole and the east coast of Greenland, - an area as big as south of Norway.
The film focus on the destiny of the North Norwegian sealing tradition, «squeezed» between animal rights activist and the pride of their profession.
This is the untold story about sealing, an activity very few people actually knows anything about, compared with the number having strong opinions against it.
BIEKKA FABMU - wind power - 2011
Director: Knutte Wester
Screenwriter: Knutte Wester
Genre: Documentary - 66 min
Production Companies: Knutte Wester, Sweden, Pomor Film, Norway
For 8 years director Knutte Wester has filmed his friend Gzim. He met 8 year old Gzim for the first time in a refugee camp in northern Sweden. Even though being a refugee half his life Gzim has kept the charm of a little boy. Now 8 years later Gzim is back in Kosovo living in the ruins of the farm where he was born. In reverse Knutte Wester reveals a story about friendship, loss and the desperate need to fit in. Follow Gzim transforming from a tough teenager to an innocent child back to the moment where finally all his hopes were crossed.
GZIM REWIND - 2011
Bigger than a whale - 1999
REVOLUTION
Directors: Knut Skoglund and Svein Andersen
Screenwriter: Knut Skoglund and Svein Andersen
Genre: Romance, Documentary - 52 min
Production companies: Pomor Film
A story about whalers, - in the middle of work, - in the middle of a spectacular nature, - in the middle of an international conflict of values.
Very few film crew have been in position to follow the North Norwegian whalers and look into what whaling is all about.
«Bigger than a whale» moves beyond the international conflict about whaling and invites the audience themselves to judge about the drama where it takes place: offshore where the small vessel and the mink whale meets, and onshore, where people are dependent on a sustainable catch of both whales and fish.
By following the whalers throughout a whole year, this documentary puts whaling into a larger context.
Lower depths - Na dnje - 1998
Director: Knut Skoglund
Screenwriter: Knut Skoglund
Genre: Documentary - 27 min
Production Company: Pomor Film, Norway
Two revolutions and nearly a century after Maxim Gorkijs famous play «Lower depths» had its first night, two regional theatres from Murmansk, Russia and Tromsø, Norway, stage the play in which the characters believes in visions painted out by Luka, the main character. But like Gorkijs prophecy’s, the co-operation also ends up with broken dreams.
Sealers, killers or hunters? - 1997
Art Films
Director: Knut Skoglund / Are Andreassen
Screenwriter: Knut Skoglund / Are Andreassen
Genre: Art - 21 min
Production Company: Pomor Film, Norway
The film penetrates into a craftsman inner life, meditative work and choices, and depth the art of metal graphics. It shows what the audience never sees in meeting a graphic artwork, - what disappears in the ethylated- and white spirit clouded veils, - close ups that give associations to landscape and architecture. See the entire film below.
Graphic Mass - origin - 2008
Devil´s bride - 2016
Director: Yanis Koussim
Screenwriter: Yanis Koussim
Genre: Drama, experiment, 90 min
Production companies: Kaméra com, Algeria, Les Films De Francoise, France, Pomor Film, Norway
When night falls on Algiers 'la Blanche', the city walls turn to grey ... grey as sadness, loneliness, vice, fear and insomnia, as the dull eyes of men and women of the night in Algiers, that Lilia, the photographer, captures for her exhibition: ALGIERS BY NIGHT (EXPERIMENT).
This is a night time urban drama, using documentary process, to tell about these people.
ALGIERS BY NIGHT - 2018
Director: Saara Cantell
Screenwriter: Saara Cantell, Leena Virtanen
Genre: Drama, 110 min
Production companies: Periferia Productions Oy, Gøtafilm, Pomor Film AS, Sun & Moon Pictures Intl, Schuberth International Film
The story of Anna (16) takes place on Åland Island in 1666, just as the most widespread and systematic witch hunts in Scandinavian history were beginning. In all, 16 women were convicted of being in league with the devil, and seven of them were executed. For Judge Psilander, who has mastered the newest witch theories of the time, the trials are meant to cleanse the island of superstition, and to let science and common sense prevail.
A BASTARD CHILD - 2017
Director: Knutte Wester
Screenwriter: Knutte Wester
Genre: Documentary - 57 min
Production Companies: Bautafilm, Sweden and Pomor Film, Norway
In 1909, in an undemocratic Sweden, a bastard child is born. Her mother is unmarried, due to which she is called a whore and driven away from her home. She grows up at shelters and orphanages, rejected by society. As an adult she spends her life struggling for social justice. In old age she tells us her unique story.
Filmmaker and artist Knutte Wester brings his grandmother’s story to life through his own paintings.
Production funding: Swedish Television, The Swedish Film Institute, Film i Västerbotten, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Nordnorsk Filmsenter.
