Popular Music

The sixties and seventies in Pajala, at the very top of Sweden. Matti and Niila grow up there, in the Finnish-speaking Torne Valley, inside a minority counted as neither properly Swedish nor properly Finnish. The first record that reaches them changes everything and they decide they are going to be rock stars. The world around them is hard: drink, silence, beatings, and long winters in which nothing happens. The grown Matti, looking back, carries the guilt of Niila's death. Adapted from Mikael Niemi's novel, which was an enormous book in Sweden; Reza Bagher directs. A northern coming-of-age story in which the comedy and the hurt occupy the same scene.