‘Silver Stars’ Director Auli Mantila takes Nordic Noir in New Directions in ‘Transport’

variety.com:

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent“You’re a horse person?” a Belgian stable owner asks Johanna, a young Finnish journalist delving into the discovery of a microchip in a baby’s meat patty at a Helsinki daycare center.

Only creator-director Auli Mantila’s own horse affiliations as a qualified farrier may explain in part one of the most singular of entries at this year’s Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize: “Transport.”This is Scandinavian crime drama, but “ordi-noir,” Mantila told the Nordisk Film & TV Fond newsletter, in that it “happens in broad daylight, involves people with no special talent or trauma, and takes place in locations anyone could just walk in.”It also addresses a massive but little explored subject, turning on pan-European food fraud which embroils three women: Marianne, a by-the-book bank loans exec forced to money launder earnings of a sinister food import company; an insurance investigator checking the disappearance of a border control veterinarian; and the indefatigable Johanna.

A Finnish public broadcaster YLE original series, and part of its notable line in international co-production, “Transport” is distinguished, as its short synopsis says, by its story of largely ordinary women, under pressure from their authoritarian male bosses to buckle under in a corrupt or constricting reality.

Here the women fight back.Produced by Finland’s Miia Haavisto (“Tom of Finland”) and Tia Talli (“Nurses”) of Tekele for YLE, in co-production with Belgium’s Philippe de Schepper (“Black-Out”) and Jonnydepony’s Helen Perquy (“Tabula Rasa”), “Transport” was picked up for global distribution by REinvent Studios in a deal announced at the tail-end of last year’s Berlinale Series Market.