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According to Finnkino, there is such a large Indian audience living in Finland that screening Indian films is profitable.
Paparao Uppalapati, Naga Dheeraj Biddala and Nikhitha Vugranampalli were at Kinopalatsi in Helsinki to watch an Indian Telugu-language movie.
Indian films are being shown more frequently on big screens in Finland, according to Finnkino, the country’s largest cinema chain.
Toni Lähteinen, Finnkino’s Head of Programming, told Yle that enough Indians are living in Finland for Indian film screenings to be profitable.
Currently, just under 20,000 Indians reside in Finland.
According to Lähteinen, movies in multiple Indian languages have been shown more regularly in Finnkino cinemas since 2019. The pandemic slowed the market, but since 2021, they have been screened across Finland, everywhere from Helsinki to Oulu.
“This is a typical phenomenon in general, as immigrants want to see films from their own culture,” he said.
Yle spoke with Indian couple Nikhitha Vugranampalli and Naga Dheeraj Biddala, who recently watched the nearly three-hour-long Telugu-language film Game Changer at the Kinopalatsi in Helsinki.
“It gives us the same experience as in India because we get to meet a lot of other Indians as well. It also makes us happy when we see Finnish people join us,” said Vugranampalli.
Telugu, spoken by 74 million people in India, has its own film industry called Tollywood, which is one of the largest in the nation.
Many of the films are often screened with English subtitles.
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Moviegoers watching an Indian language movie in a Finnish cinema. Image: Kristiina Lehto / Yle
Indian films always have an intermission
According to Lähteinen, Indian movies differ from their Western counterparts as they are primarily melodramas, featuring strong emotions, music, dance and dramatic scenes.
The movies are also often longer than most Hollywood productions, sometimes up to three hours long, and always include an intermission.
“An intermission is already built into the film, and is about a ten-minute break. It acts like a pause in the story,” Lähteinen said.
During the intermission, audiences leave the theatre to stretch their legs, use the restroom and buy snacks.
This is something rarely seen in Finnish or Western movie productions in recent years, but Lähteinen notes that there have been exceptions.
In 2017, the three-hour-long Finnish film The Unknown Soldier, (Tuntematon Sotilas in Finnish) directed by Aku Louhimies, also had screenings with intermissions.
This spring’s upcoming Hollywood release The Brutalist, which runs for over three hours, also features a built-in intermission.
Lähteinen said that, in general, Finnkino does not want to interrupt films just to give audiences a break.
“We want to respect the filmmakers’ vision of whether a movie can be paused at some point, or if even a long film is meant to be watched in one sitting. For this reason, intermissions are only included in our Indian films,” he said, adding that Indian movies are also shown for a shorter period in the theatres.
“When the audience numbers for Hollywood films drop by 30 percent after the first week, the audience numbers for Indian films drop by 70 percent within the same time frame,” he noted.
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Indian movies often feature strong emotions, music, dance, and dramatic scenes. Image: Kristiina Lehto / Yle
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