Kari Väänänen

An actress, three months post-partum, reads through fragments of the archive of Suzanne Césaire as she prepares to perform excerpts of the writer's work. A post-biopic about Caribbean surrealist Suzanne Césaire, deconstructing the process of bringing an actually-lived life to film. The film examines her relationship with her husband, French politician Aimé Césaire, and famed surrealist André Breton. Filmed on the grounds of a palm tree archive in South Florida, a small group of filmmakers and actors consider the "paradise" of historic and political memory. The film takes place primarily in the space of the film set itself where actors and crew confront the history of this writer in her youth, and then stage scenes from her life. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire is writer-director Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's first feature and stars César-award-winning actor Zita Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster. Inspired by the structures of Césaire's own writing, which often took a colonial convention and unraveled it, the film deconstructs the narrative period biopic genre, moving between a conventional cinema and deconstructed experimental scenes. With a soundtrack by singer Sabine McCalla, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire plants us firmly in the darkness and desire of its subject matter while acknowledging the impossibility of resuscitating a legacy partially lost to time. —Official site

The recession hits a couple in Helsinki. Tram driver Lauri loses his job. Shortly later, the restaurant where his wife Ilona works as a head waitress is closed. Too proud to receive money from the social welfare system, they strive to find new jobs. But they are completely unlucky and clumsy, one disaster is followed by the next. —Frank Wallner <wallnerf@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>

Three struggling artists try to make passable livings in Paris despite setbacks and tragedies. Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise. Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi, a barmaid. The day he asks her to move in with him, he is deported. Six months later, he sneaks back to Paris, and Mimi leaves her new boyfriend to be with him. Conflicts arise, especially around their poverty, and soon Mimi and Rodolfo separate, as do Marcel and his Musette. The three men scrape together a meal to celebrate All Saints' Day, and Mimi arrives, ill. Can her friends bring her back to health? Can love rekindle? —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

The story concerns the exploits of an extremely inept but dedicated troupe of accordian musicians, ''The Leningrad Cowboys''. These eight Finnish lads head off for New York. There they encounter yet another wise guy, who sends them off to Mexico by car to play at his cousin's wedding. Along the way, they get bookings wherever they can, learn American music styles, and get along fabulously.

Playboy Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, a paper baron in today's Finland. A bizarre black-and-white film noir reworking of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. After the death of his father, young Hamlet inherits a seat on the board of a company controlled by his uncle that decides to move into the rubber duck market. But Hamlet is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding his father's death... —Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>