Aurinko laskee Lemmenjoella / The Last Misfits by the Golden River

The natural world is reminiscent of American westerns, but these vast landscapes are located in Lapland, in the far north of Finland. Here, far away from the modern world, a small community is still chasing the old dream of finding gold – day in and day out, they dig and mine the cold earth. An 80-year-old man works 16 hours a day with his spade. And for the past 40 years, a woman has been looking out of the small window of her hut at the same, unchanged panorama. A little boy, the lone child in this vast solitude, struggles with boredom and questions his father about whether the arduous undertaking is meaningful. Amidst the picturesque, barren expanses and the slow pace of everyday life of the few inhabitants, time seems to stand still. But new mining laws, which aim to ban digging for gold in the future, foreshadow the changes on the horizon. The end is nigh for a tradition that is more than 150 years old.