Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

• The film builds on writer-director Jalmari Helander's own viral shorts "Rare Exports, Inc." (2003) and its 2005 sequel "Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions," both produced by Woodpecker Film, which established the idea of a company that traps and exports wild Santas.
• The story is set at Finland's real (and folklorically loaded) Korvatunturi fell near the Russian border, but the film was actually shot on location in Norway, not at the real site.
• The Santa creature and his "elves" — naked, wild-eyed old men who serve as his brainwashed enforcers rather than jolly helpers — were brought to life mainly through practical costume, prosthetic, and makeup work; the film won Finland's Jussi Award for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design (plus Best Cinematography, Music, Sound Design, and Editing).
• International sales were handled by the French company Kinology, which won a bidding war for the rights at the Berlinale. The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival on August 7, 2010, where it won the festival's Variety Piazza Grande Award.
• Onni Tommila, who plays young Pietari, first appeared in the Helander family's 2005 short "Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions" at around age six, years before he took the lead role in the feature. His real-life father, Jorma Tommila, plays his onscreen father Rauno.
• The film opened day-and-date for Christmas 2010 across Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, the UK, and Australia, with Oscilloscope Laboratories handling U.S. distribution.

The massive horned figure isn't a monster at all but the last of a pre-Christian shamanic tradition, and the 'naughty children' myth survived because early humans weren't describing moral judgment—they were describing genuine predation by a species that culled the weak.

Pietari's father Rauno isn't just protecting the boy out of paternal instinct; the film quietly implies the reindeer herders' community has always known what sleeps in the mountain, and their isolation is deliberate containment, not rural accident. The butcher's tools they wield aren't improvised weapons—they're the same implements their ancestors used when the creature last woke.

The corporate drilling team's complete ignorance of local folklore isn't mere cultural arrogance—it's the film's central thesis that modern capitalism has severed humanity from the protective myths that kept these things buried. Science doesn't just fail to understand the threat; it actively removes the only defenses that worked.

Deep in the frozen guts of rural Finland, a drilling operation cracks open something ancient buried in the Korvatunturi mountains. Something that is not dead. Something that has been waiting. The corporate scientists think they've found Santa Claus. They're half right. What they've actually unearthed is a towering, horned predator—the original Saint Nick from before the myth got sanitized for children. Meanwhile, two local boys and their reindeer-butchering father figure watch the operation go sideways, then catastrophically bloodier. The real Santa doesn't give gifts. He takes.