The Clan: Tale of the Frogs

Young Alex Sammakko has watched his brothers get into trouble with the law for years. They land in prison, then escape and come back to the family house in the country, and the family’s bad name grows further. Alex wants no part of it. He is in love with Mirja, whose family is not so different from the Sammakkos, but who thinks as he does. Two things make it hard: a police force that counts every Sammakko guilty in advance, and the family itself, pushing Alex onto its own road. The film tells what a surname can build in front of a person. Crime and poverty running into each other in rural Finland is the ground of the account. Markku Halme and Minna Soisalo appear in Mika Kaurismäki’s hundred and twenty minute Finnish film, completed in 1984.