Visa Vuorio, a 35-year old team leader at the Helsinki city gardening department, is suffering from a terminal neurological disease and only has a few months to live. Because of this, he is a member of a therapeutical support group for people suffering from terminal diseases. Visa's life changes when a young female reporter, Hanna Manninen arrives at the support group offering to write a series of articles about Visa's life story.

One Foot Under

The director Lauri Nurkse tells that Veijarit is a film about "arjensietokyvyttömyys" (= inability to tolerate everyday life) and about the Peter Pan complex. The main actor Mikko Leppilampi says it's about "kolkyttoistavuotiaat" (= thirtyeenagers = people of thirty behaving like teenagers). An immediate reference point is the commedia all'italiana of the 1950s and the 1960s, the black comedy often exposing the infantile stage of development of the Italian male. Saku and Ässä are anti-heroes, but we never fail to sense the humanity behind their shallow and crazy ways. Veijarit is a satire and a parody of a superficial way of life, but there is a vitality in the protagonists that we feel can lead them to a more meaningful stage of existence after the prolonged youth full of sound and fury. There is a motif of transcendence in the imagery of flying: will the balloons carry me or will they burst.