Finland

For this provocative exposé on the modern food industry, filmmaker Katja Gauriloff travelled over 30,000 kilometers to witness a single can of ravioli being made. Throughout her travels across seven different countries, Gauriloff introduces the audience to seven different workers who all contributed to making this product, including a miner in Brazil, a pig farmer in Denmark, and a tomato picker in Portugal. Gauriloff eschews editorializing to allow the images and the workers’ emotional stories to speak for themselves.

Based on a best-selling novel by Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, which has been translated into 38 languages, won multiple prizes and spawned an opera, Finnish director Antti Jokinen’s Oscar-submitted screen adaptation is a gripping, polished hybrid of contemporary thriller and historical melodrama.

A father-son road trip morphs into a musical journey examining the fraught history of Finnish immigration in Sweden. Playful and affecting, this film nabbed the Best Nordic Documentary in Gothenburg and uses vintage tunes to delve into distressing memories shared by many Swedish Finns.