Rare Exports

 

Rare Exports

2010

Director- Jalmari Helander

Cast- Onni Tommila, Jorma Tommila, Per Christian Ellefsen, Tommi Korpela, Rauno Juvonen. Ilmari Järvenpää, Peeter Jakobi, Jonathan Hutchings, Risto Salmi

From Finnland

            

      In a sparsely populated area, along the Finnish-Russian boarder, a mining company has stumbled on to a rare find. It seems that, in centuries past, the indigenous people of that region captured Santa Claus (Joulupukki, is a Finnish Yule time entity that was incorporated into the modern image of Santa). They trapped Santa in a block of ice and built a mountain over him to keep him there.

            

      In the town below, strange things are happening; people’s stoves, radiators and hair dryers go missing, a potato farmer has all of his sacks stolen,  all but one of the town’s children have disappeared, and the local population of reindeer have all been slaughtered. The adults suspect the Russians. The one remaining child, Pietari, thinks he knows the truth. He believes that the miners have unwittingly unleashed Santa Claus upon the world. His suspicions are confirmed when his father catches a naked, feral looking, old man in a wolf trap. The old man seems insane and borderline catatonic. He only perks up when he catches a whiff of Pietari. As it turns out, the crazed old man is not Santa and the truth is much worse.

           

      A lot of different cultural myths and icons have merged to form the modern day Santa and not all are as beneficent as Saint Nicholas. In fact, Yule could be a rather frightening season. The days were short, the nights were cold, and food could be scarce. In the not so distant past, Christmas was a time for telling ghost stories. In America, Christmas has largely been sanitized but it still has vestiges of its darker origins in some of the Germanic and Nordic countries. Rare Exports is informed by these traditions.

           

     The director, Jalmari Helander, made two short movies prior to this; Rare Exports Inc. (2003) and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions (2005). These short films tell the story of a company that hunts and traps wild Santa Clauses and trains them for sell and export to foreign countries. The feature length film provides a sort of origin story for that company.

            

     It’s not so much a horror movie as much as it is a dark fantasy. Not really scary as much as intriguing. A different kind of Christmas movie to be sure.