Sisu

Jalmari Helander's Sisu premiered in the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2022. Lionsgate and Sony acquired it after a competitive bidding process, in one of the largest distribution deals ever struck for a Finnish-language genre film. It won Best Direction at the Jussi Awards, Finland's 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 went on to become a cult title around the world. Sisu moves into a more straightforward action register. It draws on Westerns and on Eastwood, and on the Lapland War, the largely forgotten three-month conflict of 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 long-time Helander collaborator who played the father in Rare Exports, and the Norwegian actor Aksel Hennie (Kon-Tiki) plays the principal antagonist. Kjell Lagerroos shot it. The Finnish word sisu means, roughly, the stoic resolve of someone who will not surrender against impossible odds, and in national mythology it is exactly what carried the country through the Winter War of 1939-40 against the Soviet Union. Helander chose the title as a deliberate nod to his audience at home.