The River

The film tells six stories that touch one another within a single Saturday in a small Finnish town. Two young men pull Anni, who has gone into the river with her baby, out at the last moment. Esa, a musician looking for a loan, turns up at his father’s sixtieth birthday. Leena, a waitress, tries to bring two of her colleagues at the pizza place together. Middle aged Ilpo comes home early from the paper mill and finds a man he does not know in the bedroom. Old Milja waits at the hospital for her daughter, who is visiting her terminally ill husband. And young Santeri is looking for a way to say to himself and to those around him that he is gay. Jarmo Lampela’s hundred and eleven minute Finnish film was completed in 2001 and gathers them all on the same riverbank.