Joki

A modestly appealing tale of interconnecting lives across one day, this is a confidently delivered and ultimately affectionate take on small town Finland. The river runs through the expected human business of love, death, adultery and family dysfunction. But it also anchors the plotline of a despairing young mother at the end of her tether who looks to end it all beneath the river's deceptively calm surface. The town's bungee jump is a neatly symbolic pointer to the way these aspirant lives can go: falling helplessly into the void or leaping with a cretain grace into the hopeful future of a blue Nordic sky.