Freetime Machos

Oulu is located in the North of Finland, on the margins of Europe. Oulu is Nokia town, a city with modern factories, where Europe ends. Only one generation ago the men were lumberjacks, hunters, transport workers. Now they develop programmes for Nokia or build comfortable homes for Nokia employees who come from all over the world to work in Oulu. And everything could have been so much easier, if it hadn’t all happened so fast: the changes. The men are having problems coping with it.

There is no other country in Europe where women are so prominently represented in the upper echelons of politics, economy and administration. They set the agenda and say what’s what.

Oulu’s rugby club is permanently the second or third-worst in one of the worst leagues in the world. The men fight and struggle…and usually lose. As an onlooker one has to ask: why are they putting themselves through all that? Because it’s about something else. When they play rugby they are amongst themselves; it is one of the few remaining realms where women are excluded.

The film tells the story of the loneliest men in Finland, with a wonderful cast of characters, following the vicissitudes of the rugby club through a single season, accompanying them during their fight against the humiliation of relegation and the other changes that take place in the lives of the heroes.

Film website://www.freetimemachos.com/