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