- The Colours Of The Holocaust
- Tadao Ando / Koshino House
- A Finnish Thought
- Villa Mairea – The Essence Of A House (Long Version)
- The Colours Of Soul
- The Last Forest Boy
- The Melnikov House
- The Grief Of A School
- Villa Mairea – A House Under The Pines (Short Version)
- Zahara & Urga
- Chateau De L’âme
- Emma
- God’s Jester – Luis Buñuel
FILMS
- Jukebox
- El Último Deseo – The Last Wish
- Hospital – Daughter’s Mother
- Once Upon A Time In Sad Hill
- The Last Bookshop Of The World
- Circles & Stones
- Theo’s House
- Last Life Of Lucifer
- Water Marked
- Face To Face
- A Journey To Eden
- Icaros – Fallen Europe
- Casa Estudio Por Luis Barragán
- Le Cabanon Par Le Corbusier
- The Colours Of The Holocaust
- Tadao Ando / Koshino House
- A Finnish Thought
- Villa Mairea – The Essence Of A House (Long Version)
- The Colours Of Soul
- The Last Forest Boy
- The Melnikov House
- The Grief Of A School
- Villa Mairea – A House Under The Pines (Short Version)
- Zahara & Urga
- Chateau De L’âme
- Emma
- God’s Jester – Luis Buñuel
JUKEBOX (coming in 2025)
A feature film.
Duration: 1 h 29 min
In roles: Brontis Jodorowsky, Nora Armani, Nicole Ansari
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
A Sonora Estudios & Oy Bad Taste Ltd production
A road movie Inspired by a book of Peter Handke, Nobel Prize 2019.
Jacob, a French writer, says goodbye to his wife in a small village in Northern Spain and sets off on a one-man expedition to find the magic music device, the Jukebox. In his youth, the jukebox and its music had helped him overcome his trauma. On his dreamlike journey, Jacob is guided by Peter Handke’s book about the jukebox, in which the protagonist searches for his jukebox precisely in the same province where Jacob finds himself. Finally, Jacob meets a mysterious woman who helps him search for a jukebox and find the keys to true love.
Screening format: DCP
Languages: English, French, and Spanish
Subtitles: English, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish
EL ÚLTIMO DESEO – THE LAST WISH (2023)
37. Love & Anarchy – Helsinki International Film Festival, 2024
A feature film
Duration: 1 h 37 min
In roles: Eric Francés, Nora Armani, Valentín Martin Cabello, Sergio García Hernández
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd & Asociación Cultural Sad Hill production
In cooperation with SolisterraeMusic S.L
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ángel Flores, a promising Spanish actor returns to Spain to fulfill the last dying wish of his theatre master Miguel Lama. Ten years earlier, as a result of his personal tragedy, Ángel had escaped to Mexico where he had become a TV soap star. Miguel Lama’s last wish for Ángel is to travel to a remote monastery up in the mountains of Northern Spain and there to read each page of Dostoyevsky’s thousand-page-novel The Brothers Karamazov three times, then to come to his graveside in the monastery cemetery every night to tell him about the progress made in reading the novel. This mysterious experience reveals the secret of Ángel’s tragedy and helps him understand the role of reading in healing inner personal traumas. Ángel also learns that no dictator in the East, West, South or North who destroys his own people and neighbors will be able to eliminate the importance of authentic literature as the cornerstone of humanity.
Screening format: DCP
Languages: Spanish, Armenian
Subtitles: English, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish
Distribution: Oy Bad Taste Ltd, Asociación Cultural Sad Hill
HOSPITAL – DAUGHTER’S MOTHER (2021)
Lapinlahti – Tyttären Äiti
World Film Carnival Award, Singapore (WFCS), 2021
Ingenuity Award, 9. Socially Relevant Film Festival New York (SRFF), 2022
A feature film
Duration: 1 h 27 min
In roles: Ylva Ekblad, Minna Haapkylä, Tobias Zilliacus, Hannu-Pekka Björkman, Ville Tanttu, Liisa Pöntinen, Selja Lehtonen, Alejandro Pedregal
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd production
In cooperation with SolisterraeMusic S.L, Asociación Cultural Sad Hill (Spain)
Helsinki, spring 1975: Author Jeanette Aspen arrives at the Lapinlahti hospital, one of the oldest mental hospitals in the world. She is there to meet her only child, psychiatrist Karin Aspen, 36 years after sending her to Sweden as a war child at the start of the Winter War in 1939 as she herself had travelled to Spain to begin a new life. The encounter opens a drama between the mother and daughter, complete strangers to each other. The architectural beauty of the mental hospital serves as an eye-witness to a series of events in which emotions locked up for too long will splash out between the women.
Screening format: DCP
Languages: Swedish, Finnish, Spanish
Subtitles: English, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish
Distribution: Oy Bad Taste Ltd (international)
Black Lion Pictures Oy (Finland)
ONCE UPON A TIME IN SAD HILL (2019)
A creative feature
Duration 88 minutes
In roles: Pilar Puente, Marja Skaffari, Liisa Sofia Pöntinen, Margaret Jova, Ville Tanttu, Nacho Angulo
Oy Bad Taste Ltd, in cooperation with Asociación Cultural Sad Hill and SolisterraeMusic S.L (Spain)
An intelligent thriller about how women claim their freedom in a cemetery named Sad Hill, known as the final scene of Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti western film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966).
Four artists are finishing a workshop in a palace in Northern Spain as they recall a strange incident that happened to two long-time married couples who got lost nearby years before. After a dream-like walk in the mountains, the couples, strangers to each other, arrived in a mythic burial place called Sad Hill, where they had to face the naked facts of their hollow marriages in a totally new psychological light. The wives started the same walking ballet as did Clint Eastwood, Lee van Cleef and Eli Wallach in Leone’s film. In a few minutes, the lives of the couples would change completely.
Distribution: Oy Bad Taste Ltd (international)
Black Lion Pictures Oy (Finland)
THE LAST BOOKSHOP OF THE WORLD (2017)
A creative documentary
Duration 90 minutes
In roles: Hannu-Pekka Björkman, Kaisa Kukkola, Nacho Angulo, Boris Koneczny
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd (Finland) & Sonora Estudios (Spain)
Four Europeans – men and women from different cultures and different fields of art – travel in a mini bus with quality books of world literature in a desert-like landscape to find a distant place where they will establish “the world’s last bookshop”. The isolated place is just perfect for that purpose as there the printed books of the world will be much safer from the termites of entertainment industry and internet than they are in urban cities.
Screening format: DCP, Blu-ray
Languages: Spanish, French, German, Finnish
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, German, Finnish
Distribution: Oy Bad Taste Ltd & Sonora Estudios (international)
Cinemanse Oy (Finland)
CIRCLES & STONES (2016)
THEO'S HOUSE (2014)
World premiere in Quad Cinema, Greenwich Village, New York, 12.12.2014
A feature film
Duration: 108 min
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd & Butterworks Oy production
During 1980’s, Theo and Vincent, two Finnish architects, were involved in the big change of environmental identities – escalating to one coast area where they replaced 320 wooden houses by 32 concrete towers. Ten years later, in 1993, they meet in a castle in Brandenburg in former East-Germany. Their discussions go into a conflict over their projects and ethics of architecture. Finally, Theo begins to design a Dream House, but not only for himself but also for a German woman named Clara he has met once, 50 years ago in their childhood.
Screening mode: DCP, Blu-ray
Languages: English, Finnish and German
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Oy Bad Taste Ltd & Butterworks Oy (international)
PEK – Pirkanmaan elokuvakeskus (domestic)
contact: Tiina Butter – tiinabutter(at)gmail.com
Reasons of Clara (final song)
LAST LIFE OF LUCIFER (2013)
A feature film
Duration: 122 min
In roles: Timo Torikka, Minna Haapkylä, Pekka Milonoff, Hannu-Pekka Björkman
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd
A film about the greatest demon of creation who has been left out of work after Mankind has created bigger evils to speed up its ruin. Thus Lucifer decides to become human and to learn a new emotion – an ability to love. To guide him on the road to humanity, the demon selects a theatre director with a problem of his own: he can’t find the right actor for his play about Rainer Maria Rilke,
an Austrian poet from early 1900’s. Lucifer helps him to find the right actor. After his transformation to human, Lucifer meets a woman – an actress who is the reincarnation of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke’s muse.
Will they end up a happy couple in a suburb of Helsinki?
Screening mode: DCP, Blu-ray
Language: Finnish, German
Subtitles: English, Swedish, Finnish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd (international),
PEK – Pirkanmaan Elokuvakeskus (domestic)
WATER MARKED (2012)
A feature film
Duration: 102 min
In roles: Hannu-Pekka Björkman, Kalle Holmberg, Nacho Angulo, Seela Sella
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Oy Bad Taste Ltd
A half-Jewish Nordic photographer arrives at Venice, Italy, in wintertime to seek the beauty of “Other Leningrad” Joseph Brodsky, a Nobel –prized Russian poet, found there. The photographer takes silent images in Venice and opens his inner sinful reality to Brodsky, his only mental brother. The photographer carries the weight of his father who worked as an informer of Jewish people to Nazis during II World War in their home country.
Screening mode: DCP, Blu-ray
Language: Finnish, Spanish
Subtitles: English, Swedish, Finnish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd (International)
Pirkanmaan Elokuvakeskus (Domestic)
FACE TO FACE (2011)
Duration: 60 min
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2011
Face to Face is a photo cinema about the contents of our modern time concept – telling that inside of our time has been built a stream of material values, which began as oedipal fever in United States of America and ends up in Europe. It also speaks about the interdependence between the original citizens of Mother Europe and New World Europeans of ‘The Good Bad Son’ alias America, on both sides of the Big Sea. It underlines how after ‘The Second Hiroshima’ of Japan we long to a shelter against our own values. We want to forget the growing dread of our Grandmother Africa.
Screening mode: Blu-ray
Languages: English-Spanish, Finnish-Swedish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd (International)
A JOURNEY TO EDEN
(co-production with Sonora Estudios, Vitoria, Alava, Spain www.sonoraestudios.com)
A feature film
Duration: 100 min
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2011 (September)
Two male artists travelling in winter in the famous La Rioja wine-growing region of Northern Spain. One of the men, named Ignacio – a Basque modern music composer living in Finland – is weighed down by traumatic guilt at his daughter’s car accident in Helsinki: she is in a medical coma and will be returned to consciousness in 10 days. The other man, named Comaz – a Swiss painter living in Spain – is suffering from artist’s block; the model for his drawings of hands has announced she no longer wishes to continue. The men go to see paintings showing human hands in churches and monasteries and discuss such topics as Dante’s concept of Paradise and the meaning of faith and prayer. They finally end up in the chapel of the renowned Remelluri wine estate at La Rioja Alavesawhere the Basque painter Vicente Ameztoy created his own visual interpretation of Adam and Eve’s last moment of happiness in Eden. While gazing at the painting the travellers experience a mental miracle and understand something fundamental about the meaning of forgiveness.
A Finnish – Basque co-production
Screening mode: DCP, Blu-ray
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English, Swedish, Finnish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd (International)
PEK – pek@elokuvakeskus.fi (Domestic)
ICAROS - FALLEN EUROPE
Duration: 58 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2011
Pekka Jalkanen, a Finnish modern music composer, begins to compose his Russian Concerto – a concerto of longing for home – in his childhood’s home, near Russian border. At the same time, his mind makes a trip to Mother Russia and to Balkans to collect materials for his upcoming work. Analysing reasons for economical and cultural chaos in the new united Europe, the composer finally arrives at the tomb of Andrei Tarkovsky, a Russian master of world’s cinema, near Paris, to respect the memory of the auteur who spoke about longing in his films.
Screening mode: Blu-ray
Language: Finnish and Russian
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
CASA ESTUDIO por Luis Barragán
Duration: 60 min
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2010
The world-famous Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902 – 1988) designed his house and studio in the Tacubaya suburb of Mexico City during 1947 – 48.The house – better known as Casa Estudio – became a magic home also for colour, light and silence. The film tells the amazing story of Casa Estudio as an example of the metaphysical architecture of Luis Barragán.
Five Master Houses of The World -series
The film contains a bonus track:
Fragments on Barragán by Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and essayist
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
LE CABANON par Le Corbusier
Duration: 60 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2010
The world-famous architect and painter Le Corbusier (1887-1965) sketched his Thoreau-like hut in 45 minutes as a birthday present for his wife Yvonne in December 1951. The wooden cabin of 16 m2 – situated in the hillside of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in French Riviera – was to serve as a model for minimal living. The film tells the amazing story of Le Cabanon – from architect’s first arriving at Côte d’Azur via Eileen Gray’s E-1027-house to the final building connected with Étoile de Mer -restaurant– and the fate of the architect in his paradise home.
Five Master Houses of The World -series
The film contains a bonus track:
The Last Photograph (about Le Corbusier)
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
The Colours of The Holocaust
Duration: 60 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2010
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
Tadao Ando / Koshino House
Duration: 59 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2009
The world-famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando (born 1941) designed the Koshino House for the fashion designer Hiroko Koshino and her family in Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan during 1979 – 80, 1980-81 and 1983-84.The building has become the symbol of a home made for light. The film reveals the Koshino House as a collection of all the fragments of Ando’s architectonical vocabulary – not forgetting the architect’s connection to the Japanese aesthetic tradition. It also tells the life story of Tadao Ando, a self-educated architect, and about his tendency to solve the mystery of timeless and solid architecture.
Five Master Houses of the World – series
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
A Finnish Thought
Duration: 57 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2009
Five Finnish intellectuals – president Martti Ahtisaari, a Nobel peace prize 2009; Jari Ehrnrooth, a philosopher; Seija Kulkki, an innovation expert; Sirkka-Liisa Kivelä, a professor in Family Medicine, Terho Pursiainen, an author and a priest – give their personal interpretations on the question: what possibilities the mankind still have for surviving on this planet?
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Distributor: YLE, The Broadcasting Company of Finland
Villa Mairea - The Essence of a House (long version)
Duration: 50 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2009
The world-famous Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898 – 1976) designed the Villa Mairea for his close friends Maire and Harry Gullichsen as their home in Noormarkku near the west coast of Finland on the eve of the Second World War. Located in a pine forest adjoining an old sawmill area, the house was to become one of the most notable icons in modern architecture. The film reveals the Villa Mairea as a unique artistic microcosm influenced by international modern architecture and art, Finnish cultural heritage, and Japanese aesthetic tradition.The film also illustrates the design process of the project that turned into one of the seminal houses of the entire modern era.
Five Master Houses of the World – series
Screening mode: Beta SP, DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
The Colours of Soul
Duration: 24 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2008
A film about a Finnish-Jewish painter Rafael Wardi (b.1928) who is a Maestro on oil and pastel painting and on water colour. In this sensible film, 80 years old Wardi speaks about his relationship to Nature and colours, water colour and Light, not forgetting his connection to an Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi. During the film’s story, Wardi also paints a watercolour by his fingers, for the first time in his life, in his atelier in Helsinki Cable Factory.
Screening mode: Beta SP, DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: Swedish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
The Last Forest Boy
Duration: 28 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2007
The Last Forest Boy is a myth-like tale about the last wild son of Mother Nature of the Nordic Forests. His home lies deep in the woods, near by the Polar Circle. One summer’ say, as he arrives at a planted forest region and fishes there and enjoys life with his daily routines amidst the pinewoods, Forest Boy suddenly becomes aware of the signs of civilisation all around him. The time has come for him to choose: whether to flee from the inevitable approaching change or to seek a new identity in the modern world.
In leading role: Heikki Mäntymaa, a Finnish performance artist
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish, English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
The Melnikov House
Duration: 58 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2007
The world famous architect Konstantin Melnikov (1890 – 1974) designed his utopian house, an icon of modern architecture, in the centre of Moscow in the late 1920’s. When Joseph Stalin prohibited modern architecture in Soviet Union, Melnikov was denied his right to work as an architect and was in practise placed under house arrest. This film tells the amazing story of the Melnikov House and the fate of an architect imprisoned in his utopian house.
Five Master Houses of the World – series
Screening mode: Beta SP, DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
The Grief of a School
Duration: 28 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2006
A film about the grief of a Finnish village school as it becomes clear one summer that there will be no future for its pupil. The film conveys the cruel local politics that do not respect the values of local schooling and decide to close a fully active school of 30 pupils and two teachers just to earn some more annual savings. The film shows the blindness of how Finland – a promised land with high quality education and educative records – is vacating its countryside from its village-school culture.
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
Villa Mairea – a house under the pines (short version)
Duration: 26 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2005
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish, English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
Zahara & Urga
Jury Prize and Audience Prize, 9th Ethnofilmfest, Berlin 2006. Honourable Mention by Jury, 25th FIFA, Montreal 2007
Duration: 60 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2005
Screening mode: Beta SP, DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
Chateau de l’âme
Duration: 56 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2004
A film about the spiritual encounter of the works of the world-famous Finnish modern music composer Kaija Saariaho, living in Paris, and the Spanish visual artist Nacho Angulo, and about an attempt to understand what the human soul contains.In the film Nacho Angulo, living in Madrid, uses about 15 000 pieces of birch to produce his interpretation of five-part song cycle, Chateau de l’âme, composed by Kaija Saariaho. During the long working process his mind wanders in Finnish birch forests seeking the mythical background and the soul of the birch tree as well as Kaija Saariaho’s connection with this spiritual landscape of her childhood. The film depicts this encounter in a space crossing the borders of different cultures. In this space, Nacho Angulo’s starting point for his process, based on modern music, is also a deep personal grieving that necessitates finding the contents of the castle of the soul.
Screening mode: Beta SP, DVD
Language: Finnish, Spanish
Subtitles: English
Distributor: Bad Taste Ltd
Emma
(co-production with Kinotar Oy)
Duration: 27 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2001
A film about Kain Tapper, a famous Finnish wood sculpture (1930 – 2005), his working philosophy and the process of making his first erotic sculpture, a giant wooden work named Emma.
Screening mode: DVD
Language: Finnish
Subtitles: Swedish
Distributor: Kinotar Oy, Finland
(More Rax Rinnekangas films produced by Kinotar Oy – see link: www.kinotar.com )
God’s Jester – Luis Buñuel
Duration: 29 minutes
Directed by Rax Rinnekangas
Year: 2000
A semidrama about an English literature profesor solving the mystery of Dry Martini, Luis Buñuel’s legendary drink. The story happens in the monastery of El Paular in Segovia, Spain where Luis Buñuel, a world-famous Spanish film director spent some of the last happy moments of his life.
In leading role: Neil Hardwick.
Screening mode: DVD
Distributor: YLE, The Broadcasting Company of Finland