Helsinki-based film collective Film Tonight! went through the vast programme of Espoo Ciné and carefully handpicked their eleven favourite screenings. Check out their recommendations below!
We are Film Tonight!, a Helsinki-based film collective established in April 2023 by Helena Aleksandrova, Jelica Jerinić, Roxana Sadvokassova, and Mariangela Pluchino—four filmmakers united by a shared passion for cinema, feminist values, a common film school history and immigrant background.
It is the best ending of the summer again—ESPOO CINÉ! The program is so goood this year, our task was hard. Yet we carefully selected our film recs to help you find a way in this jungle of great films. We haven't had the chance to view most of the films yet, but our expectations are high. See you at the festival!
MARIANGELA’S RECS:
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari 2024)
Synopsis: Over seven hallucinatory days, a village with no name, in an undefined time and place, disappears.
Comment: A blurry line between a period piece and a contemporary fragment, a mix of kooky and multidimensional characters, a collection of conflicting values. The conscientious cinematography by Sean Price Williams, is a dynamic voyage in 16mm that embarks the viewer in a visual revel.
Skönärit (Milja Viita 2025)
Synopsis: A collage film about a young sailor’s awakening to the world’s contradictions, filmed by Finnish seafarers 1960–1990.
Comment: A young sailor portrayed by Finnish seafarers during the 60–90s is definitely a universe in which I want to navigate. The stills on Super 8mm of this experimental doc, are damped with the homoeroticism of the sailors aesthetics. A real-life clash between Querelle and Tom of Finland. There’s a Q&A with the director after the movie!
Gunvor Nelson – A Woman’s Lot (1966, 1983 & 1984)
Synopsis: two shorts and one medium length film by Gunvor Nelson.
Comment: A filmmaker and artist worth discovering. The author of the iconic My Name is Oona rejected labels: she refused to be called a feminist, refused her films to be categorized as experimental. To approach Nelson’s films is to remain open, and intake what she herself described: “personal films”. Attend this program as a celebration of her life; Nelson passed away this January at the age of 93.
JELICA’S RECS:
Little Trouble Girls (Urška Djukić 2025)
Synopsis: Coming-of-age drama about a 16-year-old girl in a Catholic choir, who goes on a trip to an Italian monastery to prepare for the upcoming performance.
Comment: Slovenian director Urška Djukić, already known to Finnish audience for her award-winning short Granny’s Sexual Life (Tampere Film Festival Grand Prix 2022), returns with her captivating feature debut. Beautifully shot, the film deals with delicate topics of sexual awakening in a strict religious environment, female friendship and misuse of authority. Very sensitive and intimate, Urška’s film reminds of works of Céline Sciamma.
Holy Electricity (Tato Kotetišvili 2024)
Synopsis: A teenage boy and his uncle find a suitcase of rusty crosses and decide to turn them into neon crucifixes and sell them to people.
Comment: The film includes improvisation and non-professional actors, which I like a lot, as it brings freshness to the screen. It mixes fiction & stylized social realism, and is a debut feature by Georgian director Tato Kotetišvili. I hope you are equally excited about new voices in cinema as me.
The film has been awarded the main prize in the competition series for first-time films at the Locarno Film Festival.
ROXANA’S RECS:
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland 2024)
Synopsis: a coming-of-(old)-age film about an elderly woman adjusting to life in assisted living, as she navigates memory loss, evolving identity, and complex relationships with her caregivers and herself.
Comment: Familiar Touch, directed by Sarah Friedland, who brings firsthand experience from working in a care facility, beautifully captures the emotional and vulnerable nuances of aging. The film won Best Debut, Best Director, and Best Actress in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. With autumn and winter just around the corner, it’s the perfect film to watch this season.
Trains (Maciej Drygas 2024)
Synopsis: A collective portrait of people, their hopes, desires and tragedies in the 20th century created through found footage of steam trains.
Comment: Trains is a visual and rhythmic symphony, composed entirely of archival footage capturing steam trains and the people who traveled on them during the early 20th century—a turbulent era marked by unrest between the wars. This wordless film weaves the mechanical rhythm of the trains with the emotions, hopes, and lived experiences of the travelers, creating a powerful meditation on movement, memory, and time.The heavy clatter of wheels keeps rolling, patterns repeat, and all that remains after the mechanical huffing, puffing marvel passes are the drifting clouds of steam. The film was awarded as the Best Film at the IDFA Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.
bluish (Lilith Kraxner, Milena Czernovsky 2024)
Synopsis: Two art students wonder around on a city’s gloomy winter days.
Comment: I’m a sucker for gloomy winter days, soft gaze, sensory fragments of everyday life, and an atmosphere filled with ambiguity, fragility, and longing. A few words and plenty of blue.
HELENA’S RECS:
Letters from Wolf Street (Arjun Talwar 2025)
Synopsis: A feel-good documentary capturing residents and the spirit of one street in Warsaw, as well as the director's personal connection to it.
Comment: I had the pleasure to see the film at the Berlinale 2025 premiere and it touched me deeply. Besides being a beautiful & surprising portrait of one micro-community, the film deals with a broader topic—what it takes to assimilate to a new society. Arjun Talwar, the film’s director and cinematographer originally from India (speaking fluent Polish in the film!) raises questions about friendships, racism and how to make it as a filmmaker in a foreign country.
Köln 75 (Ido Fluk 2025)
Synopsis: Based on a real story(!), the film is about 17-year-old Vera Brandes, who organised the iconic gig and album ‘Köln Concert’ of jazz musician Keith Jarrett.
Comment: I missed that in Berlinale ’25, regrettably …..And let me repeat again—the film is about The Youngest Gig Promoter of Germany in 1975 (and 70s fashion!).
As a humble party planner and aspiring music promoter myself, I am extremely excited about this film and how she staged it all without any social media.
And what a relief—the music film, for once, is not about a wife, a muse or a groupie - it is about A F*****G LEGEND!!!! Up till now, she produced and published 350 albums after this wild start, so I hope more films on her career will come.
Subtitles are in Finnish.
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Kirill Serebrennikov 2025)
Synopsis: Based on the 2017 non-fiction novel of the same name by Olivier Guez, it follows the story of notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele during his fugitive years, from Paraguay to the Brazilian jungle
Comment: Currently Kirill Serebrennikov is the most visionary & prolific Russian film & theater director living in exile. I recommend following all of his works, that in the past years were all connected to real-life personas. Without classical biography-history film approach, he brings his own artistic vision to the real stories.
This one deals with a heavy subject, but I trust that no one else would and could do it better now than him. I'm looking forward to it!
Premiered in Cannes earlier, it stars August Diehl.
Photo: Film Tonight!