Kesän Lapsi

Only 40 miles separate 11-year-old Svetlana’s orphanage in Russia from the house in Finland where she spends her summers, but the disparity between the lives she leads in the two locations couldn’t be greater. Each year families in Finland take in orphans from Russia to give them a happy summer, but how does that brief life change affect the children? Olsson’s vérité impression of Svetlana’s life brings you viscerally into her world, from the grandmother in Russia too poor to care for her to her kind Finnish foster family who speak almost no Russian. The film is almost overwhelmingly powerful, and ends with a grace and sadness you will never forget.