dir. Antti Jokinen
year. 2012
country: Finland
run-time. 125
rating. 18
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors 19:00
Film 19:30
Hollywood-based Finnish director Jokinen (“The Resident”), adapted Finnish author Sofi Oksanen’s play and best selling novel “Puhdistus”(“Purge”) winner of both the 2008 Finlandia Prize and the 2009 Runeberg Prize.
The story of two women from two different eras linked by separate tales of deceit, desperation - and fear. Aliide has experienced the horrors of the Stalin era and the deportation of Estonians to Siberia, but she herself has to cope with the guilt of opportunism and even manslaughter. One night in 1992 she finds a young woman in the courtyard of her house; Zara has just escaped from the claws of the Russian mafia who held her as a sex slave. Aliide later finds out that the girl is related to her. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.
“Based on a best-selling novel by Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, Purge is a gripping and polished hybrid of contemporary thriller and historical melodrama.” Hollywood Reporter
“Part melodrama, part historical Gothic, part woman’s revenge picture, “Purge” links the abuses wrought by Stalin’s legacy; the savage 1940 Soviet occupation of Estonia and the recent Russian Mafia sex trade” Cinema Without Borders