Compartment No. 6

Juho Kuosmanen's Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6) won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2021 (sharing the prize with Asghar Farhadi's A Hero) and was Finland's official Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film. The film consolidated Kuosmanen, after his earlier The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, as one of the most distinctive Finnish directors of his generation. Adapted from Rosa Liksom's 2011 novel of the same name, with a screenplay by Andris Feldmanis, Livia Ulman and Kuosmanen.

A young Finnish archaeology student named Laura (Seidi Haarla) is travelling north on the Murmansk train from Moscow at the end of a Russian winter, fleeing an unsatisfying love affair with a married Russian academic. Her sleeper-compartment companion turns out to be Lyokha (Yuriy Borisov), a brusque, boisterous, vodka-drinking Russian miner heading to a job in the Arctic Circle. The film follows the long train journey north and the slow, unexpected friendship that develops between the two travellers across a series of stops, station-platform conversations, and shared meals.

The film operates simultaneously as road movie, character study, and Russian winter-landscape document. J-P Passi's photography of the train interiors, the snowed-over Karelian forests, and the Murmansk industrial port produced one of the most distinctive landscape registers of recent European cinema. Borisov's central performance (initially abrasive, finally tender) is one of the great recent Russian-language acting achievements; Haarla's quietly observant counter-performance anchors the film.