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The enormity of the snowy, picture-postcard vista in any Scandinavian film can never be underestimated, signifying both a fairy tale and a foreboding setting. This fascinating dichotomy is ever present in Finnish writer-director Mikko Myllylahti’s new tale, The Woodcutter Story – the title of which sounds much like folklore in itself.

This oddball, pitch-black dramedy begins with an unexplained meeting at the top of a snowy mountain between a suited corporate type and an impatient woman – quite what is going on and who these individuals are is open to interpretation, but the pair is clearly discussing the fate of the residents below of a remote, unnamed Finnish town where the story is set.

Enter Pepe the woodcutter, his family and friends who live a simple yet uneventful life – unless there is a birthday down in the only pub. What appears to be an idyllic existence is under constant threat from disruption.

“The Woodcutter Story,” a Finnish drama with a surreal touch, has been sold to Australia (Palace Films), Baltics (Estinfilm), Sweden (Njuta), Germany (Eksystent) and France (Urban), Paris-based Totem Films shared exclusively with Variety.

Directed by Mikko Myllylahti, it sees a good man who runs into bad luck: he loses his job and his wife leaves, but Pepe (Jarkko Lahti) is trying to keep his head high. Even when strange things start to happen in his sleepy village.

The film, which premiered in Cannes’ Critics Week, screens Wednesday at the Helsinki Film Festival – Love & Anarchy. It will have its North American premiere at Chicago Film Festival and its U.K. premiere at the London Film Festival.

“It’s a very strange film,” said Myllylahti back in May. Also opening up about a real-life encounter – and real-life woodcutter – that inspired him.

“There was something very Finnish about the way he was dealing with his ordeals: sometimes,...

During the winter in a small town in northern Finland, you might find yourself making plans to ask questions about human existence on a Saturday night. Or perhaps you’ll stay up in bed, giggling while reading a book by Sigmund Freud. Such is the surreal world of “The Woodcutter Story,” and right in the middle of it is Pepe (Jarkko Lahti), a man so relentlessly bright-sided that his constant, glass-is-half-full view of life can drive his friends and co-workers to anger.

Continue reading ‘The Woodcutter Story’ Review: A Surreal & Strange Story About The Nature Of Existence [Cannes] at The Playlist.

There is a sort of checklist for Finnish films — and I say this with love — that includes snowy exteriors, bleakly austere interiors, ice fishing and someone getting murdered with an axe. The Woodcutter Story ticks every box, plus a few more. Characters who barely speak, for example — and who may, indeed, have nothing to say. When they do, there is a jolting humor that may not be humor at all: their deadpan delivery gives nothing away. This is the Finnish way.

Director/writer Mikko Myllylahti — a poet who also penned the script for Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, which won a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 — sets his Cannes Critics’ Week title in an unnamed village in the far north of Finland clustered around a timber mill. Myllylahti’s hero Pepe is a timber worker, played by the same actor...

Finland’s Mikko Myllylahti returns to Cannes’ Critics Week with his feature debut as a director “The Woodcutter Story.” His short “Tiger” premiered in the same section in 2018, while “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki,” which he co-wrote with Juho Kuosmanen, won Un Certain Regard back in 2016.

“It’s a very strange film,” he tells Variety about his dark fairytale about the ever-optimistic Pepe, whose world – confined to a small, snowbound town – is slowly crumbling around him. Admitting that after “Olli Mäki,” based on a true story of a boxer preparing for his big break in the 1960s, he needed to “get away from reality.”

“I was fascinated by old tales and in Finland, they can be quite cruel,” he says. But the film was also inspired by a real-life encounter with a woodcutter from the north, not far away from his hometown of Tornio, whose calm...

Cannes Critics’ Week film “The Woodcutter Story” has debuted its trailer. It’s the feature film directorial debut from Mikko Myllylahti, the writer of Cannes Un Certain Regard winner “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Makki.” The film is being sold by French sales outfit Totem Films.

“The Woodcutter Story” centers on Pepe, a woodcutter in an idyllic small town in Finland. In the span of a couple of days, a series of tragic events gradually destroys his quiet and happy life – but Pepe seems to be fine with it all, as if he held a secret to existence that is hard to grasp.

Myllylahti was inspired to write the story following an encounter with a woodcutter who – despite having lost everything – “accepted his ordeals with a smile on his face.”

Myllylahti said: “The more I thought of him and his attitude towards life I started to realize a potential for a story,...

Paris-based company had a high-profile 2021 with titles including ’Compartment No. 6’ and ‘My Sunny Maad’.

Paris-based Totem Films will launch a quartet of first features with 2022 festival hopes at the EFM next week (February 10-17), including directorial debuts by The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki co-writer Mikko Myllylahti and Italian actress Jasmine Trinca.

The company’s 2021 slate enjoyed a buzzy festival run, led by Cannes Grand Prix winner Compartment No. 6 as well as Berlinale best documentary winner We, Berlin Competition title Ballad Of A White Cow and My SunnyMaad, which took the jury award at Annecy.

Finnish...

The Woodcutter Story

A TorinoFilmLab and Cinéfondation lab selection, and winner of the Critics’ Week’s Next Step Award, there is a lot of forward momentum for Finnish filmmaker Mikko Myllylahti‘s debut film. Filming on The Woodcutter Story (aka Metsurin tarina) might have wrapped up in February of 2021 – but the final touches were completed just this past December. Starring Hannu-Pekka Björkman, Jarkko Lahti (featured in image above), Katja Küttner and Aki Rumbin, Myllylahti tackles the not so rare occurrence of the destructive nature of alcoholism – and in terms of style and tone, we can imagine this might be fitted with some noir Scandi humor.…...

Directed by Antti Jokkinen, the biopic is about Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck.

Picture Tree International has boarded sales for Antti Jokinen’s Finnish drama Helene.

Picture Tree plans to screen the film for buyers at Goteborg’s Nordic Film Market and at Berlin’s European Film Market, with a festival premiere coming later in 2020. The film was previously touted as a work in progress in Haugesund in August 2019.

The biopic is about Helene Schjerfbeck, a Finnish painter who lived a quiet life in the countryside with her elderly mother. The film covers her life from 1915-1923, when an art dealer...

Juho Kuosmanen's The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016) is playing July 1 - August 1, 2017 exclusively on Mubi in the United States. It was our great pleasure to welcome Jarkko Lahti, the lead of Juho Kuosmanen's feature debut, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, to our office to talk about his experience making the film.

Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Juho Kuosmanen's The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016) is playing July 1 - August 1, 2017 exclusively on Mubi in the United States.The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is a subtle bait-and-switch of a film, but that’s okay. Certain generic conventions imply that it will head in a certain direction, but I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that it doesn’t. In fact, the refusal of Olli Mäki—the film and the man—to play by the rules is the most interesting thing it has going for it. The man, like the film, has a very clear trajectory mapped out in front of him, and a super-human form of concentration—the kind that makes “winners”—is demanded of him. Instead, Olli prefers to live a life of distraction,...

Chicago – As a film set in 1962, shot on glorious black & white 16mm stock, “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki” has both a feeling that it was made back then, and a timelessness that radiates from that quality. The film is about a boxer, but his heart turns out to be the champion.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

This is based on an actual event, the 1962 Featherweight boxing championship that took place in Finland, between the title character Olli Mäki and American Davey Moore. Although the match is the centerpiece, the story is about young love, and how it can be more important than the “biggest thing ever.” The dichotomy between the two factors is the engine of the plot, and creates a nice meditation on life’s priorities – similar to what happens in “Rocky” – and truer to a spirit of what transpires in real life. This is a hidden gem, which won awards at Cannes,...

Juho Kuosmanen’s first feature, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, is a modest-seeming film that hits all of its marks with unusual precision, following featherweight boxer Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) in the two weeks leading up to a big fight against American champ Davey Moore. Mäki is nervous and evasive, slacking on his training and running away to the distraction of his maybe-fiance. Throughout the film, he’s trailed by a documentary crew (a detail based on reality) that repeatedly stages faux-verite scenes of Mäki in training, meeting financiers, et al. — in a sly way, Kuosmanen is almost congratulating himself on the high […]...

A lighthearted Finnish comedy-drama about a real-life boxer, a biopic of Chile’s national hero and a gruesome yet beautiful cannibal horror

Gentle Finnish comedy-drama about real-life featherweight contender Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) who in 1962 challenged the Us title-holder. If only he could take his eyes off the delightful Raija (Oona Airola), he might actually be in with a chance. Like Olli himself, this whimsical film is as light as a feather without ever feeling inconsequential.

Continue reading...

The story of a Finnish boxer taking on a big-shot Us star on home turf is the basis for this strange and wonderful comedy

Here is a treat and a delight: this lovely film from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen is a gentle, shrewd, somehow mysterious love story, based on real life, beautifully photographed in luminous black-and-white and drawing inspiration from Scorsese and Truffaut. It is inspired by the Finnish boxer Olli Mäki, who electrified Finland’s boxing fans in 1962 by getting a shot at the world featherweight title, fighting on home turf against visiting American star Davey Moore. It is to be the greatest day of his life – but not for the reasons he might once have thought.

The movie has Jarkko Lahti playing the intense, wiry Olli, who finds that as the big fight approaches, he has fallen in love with a beautiful young schoolteacher, Raija (Oona Airola) – to...

Author: Stefan Pape

As a sub-genre, few are quite as consistently triumphant as boxing movies, thriving in notion of the underdog, surviving off that very concept that in that ring anything is possible, and no matter how much your back is against the ropes, no matter how many times you may be saved by the bell – one moment of magic and the contest could be turned in your favour. Finnish drama The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki revels in this very idea, based on a real life story that pitted an outside bet against a safe one – told in a uniquely Scandinavian way, where romance takes precedence over the archetypal sports narrative.

Set in 1962, we meet Olli Maki (Jarkko Lahti), the modest, self-effacing boxer awarded a shot at the World Featherweight title against Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.) by his eager trainer, and self-imposed promoter Elis Ask (Eero Milonoff). A huge deal,...

Boxing drama wins eight prizes including best film.

Period boxing drama The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki dominated the field at Friday’s Jussi Awards (Mar 24), Finland’s primary national film awards.

The film, which debuted at Cannes Film Festival 2016 in Un Certain Regard and was Finland’s submission in last year’s foreign language Oscar race, scooped half of the 16 awards on the night, including best picture.

It also took best director for Juho Kuosmanen, best actor for Jarkko Lahti, best supporting actress for Oona Airola, best editing for Jussi Rautaniemi, costume design for Sari Suominen, cinematography for J-p Passi, and make-up for Salla Yli-Luopa.

Elsewhere, drama The Mine won best screenplay for Pekko Pesonen and best supporting actor for Jani Volanen. Best actress went to Linnea Skog for Little Wing, and best documentary was presented to Katja Gauriloff’s Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest.

Best production design went to Santtu Toivola for Flowers...

It’s not two genres you’d necessarily think of being a perfect blend — boxing and romance — but Juho Kuosmanen got it just right with his feature debut, “The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki.” The film picked up an Un Certain Regard award at Cannes last year, and after hitting a slew of festivals, it’s now gearing up to hit cinemas.

Read More: Cannes Review: Juho Kuosmanen’s Modest, Minor Key ‘The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki’

Starring Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola, and Eero Milonoff, the film tells the true story of the Finnish boxer who wins the heart of his country as he gears up for a featherweight championship fight against his U.S.

Continue reading New Trailer For Cannes Winning, Boxing Romance ‘The Happiest Day In The Life of Olli Mäki’ at The Playlist.

"Could you box for the camera? Look cruel." Mubi has premiered an official Us trailer for the Finnish film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, which critics have been raving about since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. The film won the Grand Jury prize in Un Certain Regard, and went on to play at a bunch of other film festivals. Jarkko Lahti stars as Olli Mäki, and the film tells the true story of the famous Finnish boxer who fought American featherweight world champion Davey Moore for the 1962 title. This was shot entirely on 16mm black & white film, which looks great. The full cast includes Oona Airola as his love interest Raija, plus Eero Milonoff, Joanna Haartti, Pia Andersson, and the real Olli Mäki in a cameo role. I've heard nothing but superb things about this, and I can't wait to see it myself.

After premiering at Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Un Certain Regard Prize, Juho Kuosmanen‘s debut feature The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Mäki went on to become Finland’s Oscar entry, and now it’ll get a U.S. release this spring courtesy of Mubi. Following a Finnish boxer whose newfound romance gets in the way of his training for a major fight, a U.S. trailer has now arrived and it looks to stunningly-photographed drama, all in black-and-white.

We said in our review, “The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Mäki is a boxing biopic that has no interest in the sport of boxing. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Juho Kuosmanen’s dryly funny, blissfully sweet, and deceptively absorbing work revels in Olli Mäki’s psychological surroundings as he contends with the strangeness of national promotion,...

By Jose Solís.

In 1962, a young Finnish boxer faced featherweight champion of the world Davey Moore in a match that would go down in sports history as one of the most bittersweet for the tiny European country. Director Juho Kuosmanen has captured the event from the perspective of the challenger (played by Jarkko Lahti in a breakthrough) who finds himself vanishing among the excitement and pressure of the fight. The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki is a bittersweet tale about our need to create larger than life personalities that help us fulfill our desires, but fail to fulfill those who are actually participating in the experience. We see the sensitive, but quiet, Olli light up when he’s with his girlfriend Raija (Oona Airola), even though his manager Eelis (Eero Milonoff) suggests she will only make him lose the fight. Despite that the film is about a boxer,...

The Happiest Day In the Life of Olli Mäki is a boxing biopic that has no interest in the sport of boxing. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Juho Kuosmanen’s dryly funny, blissfully sweet, and deceptively absorbing work revels in Olli Mäki’s psychological surroundings as he contends with the strangeness of national promotion, the accruing pressures of competing, and a burgeoning romance that’s feeling more permanent than he expected.

Mäki (played by Jarkko Lahti) was a Finnish boxer who had a shot at the 1962 title when he faced American champion Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.). Kuosmanen’s film drops in on Mäki shortly before the title fight when Mäki comes home to a small town for a family wedding and meets his future girlfriend, Raija (a deeply charismatic Oona Airola), the singer at said wedding. From these opening minutes,...

The boxing drama won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this year.

Juho Kuosmanen’s Cannes Un Certain Regard winner The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki is the Finnish submission for the foreign-language Oscar race.

Kuosmanen, who made his feature directorial debut on the boxing drama, also wrote the original screenplay with Mikko Myllylahti. Jussi Rantamäki produced for Helsinki’s Aamu Film Company.

The film will also screen in Toronto International Film Festival’s Discovery section before playing at the BFI London Film Festival.

B-Plan Distribution released in Finland on Sept 2. Les Films du Losange handles international sales; Mubi acquired Us and UK theatrical and digital rights.

The film, inspired by real events, is about featherweight boxer Olli Mäki, who is distracted on the day of his world championship bout because he’s fallen in love. The cast features Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola and Eero Milonoff.

The film shot...

★★★★☆ The winner of this year's Un Certain Regard prize, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is Juho Kuosmanen's chronicle of a Finnish pugilist. A unique and beautiful boxing movie shot on 16mm in black and white, it's like Wild Strawberries meets Raging Bull - though the bull isn't so much raging as in love. Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) is a humble baker, an affable and resourceful man who seems a million miles away from the ferocity and Eye of the Tiger attitude you'd normally associate with boxing. Indeed, we first see him escorting a girl, Raija (Oona Airola), to a wedding he's totally unprepared for.

Captain Fantastic’s Matt Ross wins director prize; animation The Red Turtle wins special prize.Scroll down for full list of winners

Finnish boxer drama The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki, directed by Juho Kuosmanen, has won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.

Review: The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Maki

After two Cinefondation-selected shorts, Kuosmanen has made his feature debut with this film inspired by the real life of Olli Maki, the first Finn to fight for the world championship in featherweight boxing, who is distracted by his first love on the day of the big fight.

Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola and Eero Milonoff star in the black-and-white film, which shot on 16mm. B-Plan will release in Finland in September, with theatrical releases also secured for Germany, France and Denmark.

The Finland-Germany-Sweden co-production is produced by Aamu Film Company, One Two Films...

"The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki" directed by Juho Kuosmanen is an upcoming film that will be screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Indiewire has your exclusive first look at the new trailer and poster for the Finnish movie that will have you smiling.  The black and white feature is based on the true story of the Finnish boxer Olli Mäki and his highly hyped 1962 championship match against the American featherweight champion Davey Moore. The film follows Olli as he unexpectedly falls in love and becomes more committed to pursuing a budding romance than training for his greatest fight. Read More: 2016 Cannes Film Festival: What You Need To Know About These 6 Un Certain Regard Titles The movie stars Jarkko Lahti as Olli, Oona Airola as Raija, Eero Milonoff and John Bosco Jr. The poster shows Olli in the bottom corner concentrated...

Exclusive: Cinefondation winner Juho Kuosmanen makes his feature debut with the Finnish-German-Swedish co-production.

Les Films du Losange has come on board for world sales of Juho Kuosmanen’s debut feature The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki, which has been confirmed to premiere in Cannes Un Certain Regard.

The Finnish-German-Swedish co-production is produced by Aamu Film Company, One Two Films, Tre Vänner and Film Väst.

Backers include the Finnish Film Foundation, Nordic Film & TV Fund, Yle, and Sr/Arte. The project was developed at the Ateliers d’Angers and the Torino Film Lab.

The story is based on the real life of Olli Maki, the Finnish boxer who competes for the featherweight boxing title in 1962, but is distracted by his first love. Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola and Eero Milonoff lead the cast.

The black-and-white film is shot in 16mm.

Kuosmanen won the Cannes Cinefondation First Prize in 2010 with his short The Painting Sellers.

“Juho is very...