Beyond

Just before Christmas, Leena gets a call from a hospital in the town where she grew up: her mother is dying. The call takes her back to face that mother for the first time in her adult life. The film runs two periods against each other, the woman trying to hold her own family together now, and the child of Finnish immigrants growing up in an alcoholic household in the sixties. Pernilla August's first feature as director is a loose adaptation of Susanna Alakoski's novel, with Noomi Rapace in the lead. It won the International Critics' Week award at Venice in 2010. Svinalängorna is the name of the poor housing estate the story comes out of.