Christmas Story

In Lapland a boy loses his family in an accident. Nikolas is left alone. The village decides: they will look after him in turn. Each year one family will take him and hand him on a year later. Every year, on leaving, Nikolas leaves a gift at the house where he stayed; he makes wooden toys and puts them at the door at Christmas. The years pass. A famine begins in the village and nobody can keep him. Nikolas is apprenticed to a carpenter. The man is silent and hard, but he teaches him to make toys. Juha Wuolijoki directs. Hannu-Pekka Björkman and Otto Gustavsson are in the cast. It is a Finnish production. The film tells the legend of Father Christmas without supernatural elements; there is no magic, no flying sleigh, and everything has an explanation. The matter it treats is debt and return; giving gifts is not a tradition but an account Nikolas keeps himself. The Lapland landscape and the period design work inside the narrative. It took a strong result at the Finnish box office and was sold to many countries. The strand between the carpenter and the boy is its emotional axis and the film does not hurry there. Its register is not that of a children's film; death, poverty and abandonment are shown directly. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow and the last section speeds up. Who it is for: viewers who like Northern European productions and unusual Christmas films. Who it is not for: it is sad, the pace low, and heavy for small children.