Orava

Warning: Nature detected

Welcome to a future where everything is clean, safe and under control. Nature is a memory, pets run on batteries, and troublesome emotions are fixed by adjusting your hormones. Perfect – except that almost everything that makes life worth living has been sanitised away.

Pasi (Miro Lopperi) lives a clinically controlled life designing artificial pets, until he encounters something extraordinary: a real, living squirrel – perhaps the last of its kind. The encounter awakens a curiosity no system can regulate. Soon, Emilia (Mimosa Willamo), an official tasked with enforcing the rules of wellbeing, enters the picture, followed by an even more dangerous force of nature: falling in love.

Selected as Finland’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, Markus Lehmusruusu’s sci-fi satire feels unsettlingly close to home. What do you feel beneath your feet more often: asphalt or stones on a shore? How many familiar species would have to disappear before you noticed they were gone?