Lau Nau

The Swirl is starkly beautiful images in soft pastel pink and twitchily advancing stop-motion. It begins when a primary school teacher invites a student on holiday. “In sixth grade, some say that the teacher isn’t so nice.”

The film is about a show dancer, Kristal, 40+ years, blond hair woman, who with a Lada car goes around small pubs and entertains people. First she seems a bit ridiculous, self-sufficient and naive, a potential victim, an circus animal, but she comes out as something else. Kristal is a weird saint, who takes to bear all the hate, despair, lust and confusion around her and through that gives people a momentary relief.

Själö means 'the island of souls', and no name could be more fitting for the island in the Baltic Sea, which for centuries was a last stop for women who were considered social outcasts – and who are today forgotten. They were forcibly placed in a closed institution to be studied, measured and weighed – exactly in the way that nature itself was starting to be examined around the same time. Today, the place is a research centre. A young female scientist collects samples on the island, while the whispering voices of the past and never-sent letters echo in the empty hallways.

One night at a hot-dog stand in Finnish Lapland, a commitment-phobic party animal, Aurora, meets Iranian Darian. Darian suddenly asks her to marry him. Darian needs to marry a Finnish woman to get an asylum for himself and his daughter. Aurora turns him down, as she is busy working as a nail technician and plans to move to Norway, away from her shit life. However, after meeting his sweet daughter, Aurora agrees to help him. As Aurora introduces numerous women to Darian, the two of them grow close. When the perfect wife candidate comes along, Darian and Aurora are faced with a difficult choice: pretend to be happy or to finally stop running.

Marja tries to make ends meet by taking night shifts in a newspaper delivery service, apparently mostly carried out by foreigners. During the day, she sleeps and strives to raise her little daughter as best as she can. As a single parent and lacking a solid income, life is a constant struggle. Things are about to go from bad to worse when she meets her ex-boyfriend whose obsessive demeanour about whether he is the father of Marja´s child will drive her to the edge of sanity.