How dwindling grants and a war over who deserves them are threatening Finnish cinema
Trouble is afoot in the Finnish Film industry. A recent investigation in Long Play by Kalle Kinnunen, based on interviews with nine producers, came to a stark conclusion: “Nobody is having fun”. The Finnish film industry is headed towards serious trouble. The main culprit? Money – but not just.
Several interviewees point enviously to the international successes of their Scandinavian neighbours in recent years. Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness received three nominations at the Oscars. Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value got nine. Finnish cinema is close to achieving the same. As producer Jussi Rantamäki notes: “Juho Kuosmanen is just one step away”.
None of the producers interviewed think there are open conflicts of interest in the industry as such but when scarcity is shared, two mindsets – commercial and artistic – inevitably collide.
Last autumn, public funding for Finnish cinema narrowly escaped planes massive cuts to production support from the state. A fierce campaign on behalf of Finnish cinema brought together both those who see film as a business for the domestic market, and those who have wider or more artistic ambitions. In the end, even the ruling centre-right National Coalition Party signalled that the intended cuts had been a huge mistake.
But the sector’s audible sigh of relief may only be temporary. In the current financial situation, the article notes, “no sector is safe from cuts”. Just recently, the budget manager at the Ministry of Finance, wrote a newspaper column signalling the need for further retrenchment in public finances.
Subsidies for film in Finland are already significantly than in other Nordic countries. As the article notes, there’s been no increase in the last fifteen years. On the contrary, subsidies were actually cut by five million in 2018. When you factor in inflation over the last few years, Kinnunen explains, the Film Foundation’s grants these days are “simply too small”. He emphasises that the Foundation has a statutory mandate to support Finnish culture: “this law is the cornerstone of the filmmaking ecosystem”.
What to do? “If the pot doesn’t grow, the number of films will inevitably decrease, and the number of production companies will inevitably decrease. We make too few ambitious films for the public. Should they be financed with more money specifically on cultural grounds?”, asks producer Nina Laurio.
To be clear, films aren’t generally made with grants alone. Their function is to act as seed funding, to attract commercial actors with the promise that the film is viable. Grant funding is “an essential message that there is trust in the project.” But who should get it?
The article divides Finnish films into three broad categories: films for the general public, motivated by the pursuit of high viewership; internationally co-financed films, which are usually director-driven; and domestic auteur films that are not developed on commercial lines. The latter are sometimes financed up to 70 per cent by grants from the Film Foundation.
Because so few films turn a profit, production companies have virtually no cash reserves. Self-financing essentially means the producer deferring their own fee and, in a wonderful turn of phrase in the article, “eating pea soup”.
The Finnish Cinema Association, naturally enough, has set out its position that subsidies should be directed to films with the possibility of having a large domestic audience – the target of two million is cited. There’s a big skew in terms of who watches what in Finland: domestic films account for thirty per cent of what people watch in the country overall, but it’s over half in the regions, and eighty per cent in some villages.
The Foundation operates a complicated points system for determining who gets support. Past success is a major factor. Some in the industry suspect foul play involved in manipulating applications to maximise points: including the name of a famous director on the application for example, then dropping the director once funding is in place. But, of course, it’s difficult to prove.
What do distributors want? Copper-bottomed, sure-fire, dead-cert winners. Doesn’t everyone? But, in reality, these don’t exist. Kinnunen notes an unusually large number of films that were expected to be hits have flopped in recent years. Success can spring from surprising places. Though sequels, TV spin-offs, and biopics may be statistically more likely to reach higher viewership, this can only be achieved if the end product is actually good.
What can actually happen, in the search for the magic formula to get domestic funding and appease local distributors, is something else. Domestic storylines grow stale, artistic risks are not taken, foreign market are ignored. “Courage”, the article notes, “is the only way to move forward”.
But courage with the right support networks in place. “Making a film is fantastic, but financing it is really boring,” says producer Jani Pösö.
The original article ‘Enemmän elokuvatukea mutta harvemmille. Kenelle?’ by Kalle Kinnunen was published in Finnish by Long Play on March 18, 2026.
It is available here.
Long Play is an independent, reader-funded Finnish digital magazine founded in 2014 that specialises in long-form investigative and narrative journalism.
