White Night Wedding directed by Baltasar Kormákur: an Icelandic film about a professor getting married for the second time. It's set on Flatey Island, which is off northern Iceland, and the wedding is on the longest day of the year, so the sun shines brightly the entire night. In Scandinavian style, it's a dark movie, but quite funny.
The King of Ping Pong directed by Jens Jonsson: the setting is a small Swedish town during spring break (snow is *everywhere*), where a fat kid and his skinny little brother deal with life together. I had assumed that it was a dark comedy, and there were definitely a lot of humorous points, but the sadness almost overwhelmed those.
City of Men directed by Paolo Morelli: I had seen City of God and loved it. This is not really a sequel, but the style and themes are similar. It's a wonderful and moving story about two friends who grew up together, fatherless, in the slum, who now find themselves in the middle of a gang war. One is a relatively new father and is trying to be better than his own father was. The other is trying to find a name to put in the 'father' box on his ID. 
A Christmas Tale directed by Arnaud Desplechin: a long, emotionally intense and dialogue-heavy film. The Raukkauta & Anarkia site listed the showing as French with English subtitles. Though I have seen some African French-language movies and have had no trouble understanding all the dialogue, my experience with French movies is that I can make out some of the dialogue, but it general the vocabulary exceeds my own Burkina-learned French and the accent, plus the elisions, makes it difficult for me to understand. Unfortunately, the listing was incorrect here: it was in French with Finnish and Swedish subtitles. I went to see it with my coworker Gerald and his wife Laurie. Laurie speaks more Finnish than Gerald and I do, so she was picking up some of the plot. I was picking up most of the plot due to my French skills, but I missed some crucial information. Gerald was simply annoyed. Like I said, it is long (150 minutes) and dialogue-heavy. With the exception of the scene above (as you may imagine, the next couple of frames have this man smacking his nose spectacularly on the pavement), there is little physical comedy to get the viewer through. Anyway, I liked the movie, but wish the experience had involved less work.
Entre Les Murs directed by Laurent Cantet: another French film. It follows the book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher in an ethnically diverse quartier in Paris. Bégaudeau himself plays the role of the teacher and many of the students play versions of themselves. This won the palme d'or at Cannes and apparently is France's official submission for the Foreign Language Oscar this year. Also? It was much easier for me to understand than the above movie. Like A Christmas Tale, it was in French with Finnish and Swedish subtitles. However, Bégaudeau speaks much more clearly than any of the murmuring family members in the other film. Another factor here is that the students were in quatrième (the equivalent of eighth grade), and I taught in a french-language middle school for two years. The eighth-grade-class set of French vocabulary is much more familiar to me than the family-with-multiple-victims-of-leukemia-who-blames-family-members-for-not-being-marrow-donors set of French vocabulary.The festival was a nice experience. I got to see a few of Helsinki's theaters (among the things I learned: lines for the women's restroom are ridiculously long right before the movie, but not because people are particularly slow -- ladies like movies and there are too few restrooms) and I got to see some enjoyable movies.
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