Sisu

Jalmari Helander's Sisu premiered at Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness section in September 2022 and was acquired by Lionsgate and Sony in a competitive bidding process — one of the largest distribution deals ever struck for a Finnish-language genre film. The film won Best Direction at the Jussi Awards (the Finnish national film prize) in 2023.

Helander made his name with the dark fantasy Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), about a homicidal Krautrock-flavoured Father Christmas, which had become a cult international title. Sisu represents a shift to more straightforward action-cinema register, drawing on Westerns, Eastwood, and the Finnish Lapland War — the largely forgotten three-month conflict in late 1944 in which Finland, having signed the Moscow armistice with the Soviets, fought to expel the Wehrmacht's retreating troops from its northern territory.

The lead is Jorma Tommila, a longtime Helander collaborator and the actor who played the father in Rare Exports; Aksel Hennie (Norwegian, of Kon-Tiki) plays the principal antagonist. Cinematography is by Kjell Lagerroos. The Finnish word sisu — roughly translatable as the stoic resolve of someone who refuses to surrender despite impossible odds — is, in Finnish national mythology, exactly what allowed the country to survive the Winter War of 1939–40 against the Soviet Union; the title is a deliberate national reference for the home market.