When a zombie plague is unwittingly unleashed on a small farming town, murder and mayhem ensue in Finnish filmmaker Pekka Ollula’s directorial debut “Pigtown,” which won the top prize among Nordic projects this week at Finnish Film Affair, the industry event running parallel to the Helsinki Intl. Film Festival – Love & Anarchy.
Billed by the director as a “rural romantic zombie comedy,” “Pigtown” follows Iida, a long-time animal rights activist, who wants to turn over a new leaf and stop breaking into farms. Her radical friend Anja, however, goes too far, poisoning pig feed with a strange black liquid that gradually turns the pigs into bloodthirsty zombies. When an unlucky farmhand gets bitten, the disease spreads to humans.
Meanwhile, Sami, a city boy ashamed of his roots, arrives for a relaxing weekend on his family farm. When he meets Iida at the village festival, sparks fly — until the villagers start turning into zombies one by one and the village bingo game erupts into a bloodbath. What follows is a “rural genre mash up like no other,” according to Ollula, and “an unforgettable cult experience about farming, food and survival.”
Speaking to Variety in Helsinki, where he heralded his Finnish Film Affair triumph as “a win for all genre filmmakers,” the director described the “recipe” for “Pigtown” as “extremely simple.”
“You take one part of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ for the humor; you take one part of ‘Aliens’ for the action; you take one part of George Miller’s ‘Babe’ for the heart; and then you add a generous dose of Peter Jackson’s ‘Bad Taste’ and ‘Braindead’ for the extra kick,” he said. “Mix it together with the Finnish countryside and serve it in cinemas worldwide with a good wine. That’s the recipe for mayhem.”
Written and directed by Ollula and produced by his production shingle Oohlala Pictures and Sweden’s GötaFilm, “Pigtown” won raves from the Nordic Selection jury in Helsinki, which celebrated the “sheer fun, passion and energy” the filmmaking team brought to their pitch.
“The global potential for this European co-production is obvious, and they even managed to make it personal and authentic by touching on the importance of community and family, which isn’t easy when your story happens to be a horror zombie comedy,” the jury said.
Finding himself behind the camera for the first time, “Pigtown” marks a new direction for industry veteran Ollula, who cut his teeth as part of the marketing team of 2012’s “Iron Sky” — Timo Vuorensola’s Finnish-German-Australian sci-fi spoof about Nazis on the moon — as well as its 2019 sequel “Iron Sky: The Coming Race.”
His producing credits include the comedy-horror “The Redeemers,” which racked up a string of international sales for Reel Suspects following its 2022 premiere, and the action-horror film “Delivery Run,” which was featured at the Cannes Market’s Frontières Platform for genre films last year. Pic premieres next month at the Sitges Film Festival ahead of a Nov. 5 theatrical release in Finland.
Also on the slate at Oohlala is “Crime and Punishment of Toivo Harald Koljonen,” a true crime horror film currently in development about a notorious axe murderer who was the last person to be executed in Finland.
“Pigtown” marks the latest step on an unlikely filmmaking journey for Ollula that began in the Finnish farm town of Huhtamo, where his passion for cinema was sparked at an early age. Speaking in Helsinki, the director recalled how he and his friends would pop cassettes into the family’s VHS player and watch their favorite movies on an endless loop: Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste” and “Braindead,” “RoboCop,” each entry in the “Evil Dead” and “Friday the 13th” franchises.
With his father’s camcorder, they would then make their own schlocky slasher flicks and splatter pics, with Ollula’s younger brother often serving as their go-to victim.
Though Ollula left Huhtamo at the age of 16 to pursue his higher education in Helsinki, the town remains the director’s “source of creativity,” he said. To that end, he launched the biannual Huhtamo Intl. Film Festival in 2017 in an effort to breathe new life into his struggling hometown.
“As a pig farmer’s son, I’ve been watching the decline of the countryside from very close by. Businesses going away, people dying and moving away,” he said. “I started thinking, ‘What can I do to help the situation? I need to do my part.’”
Celebrating its fifth edition this year, the festival features folksy innovations such as converting a working barn into a cinema, while recent editions have seen “The Big Lebowski” playing in the town bowling alley and “Top Gun: Maverick” screening on a local airstrip — what Ollula described as “the first and only ‘fly-in’ cinema that I’m aware of.”
“Pigtown,” he hopes, will further his mission to use his filmmaking and the festival to give a boost to the local community, both by collaborating with the townspeople during production and by showcasing Huhtamo on the big screen.
“My shooting locations are the same locations where my festival happens,” he said. “So at one point, you can be at my festival, watching my film and realizing, ‘Wait a minute — I’m here and there!’”
Finnish Film Affair takes place Sept. 24 – 26 in Helsinki.