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Members of the Interfilm Jury: Reinhard Middel (journalist and teacher of media education, Germany), Jes Nysten (pastor and film critic, Denmark), Antje Peters-Hirt (journalist, scholar of German language and literature, Germany), Kersti Uibo (documentary film director, Estonia)

On the occasion of the 45th Nordic Film Days Lübeck 2003 the Jury awards the INTERFILM Church Film Prize amounting to 2,500 EUR to:

Pahat pojat / Bad Boys / Bad Boys - A True Story

by Aleksi Mäkelä, Finland 2003, 120 min.

for the following reason:

An upfront, hard-hitting yet warm-hearted tale of four brothers who manage, in spite of a childhood marred by a cruel father, to hold on to hope and find inner strength, transforming evil into goodness.


Director Aleksi Mäkelä, born in 1969, has directed advertising films, music videos as well as comedy programmes and television films. He has made five feature films to date. For his film Sunset Riders he received the 1994 Finnish Film Prize for Best Director.

Bad Boys "topped Finland's cinema charts for weeks, attracting 800,000 viewers to become the most successful Finnish film of all time. It tells of four brothers under the thumb of a tyrannical and bigoted father. His harsh regime of discipline in a remote and dilapidated house ends when he is sectioned as a schizophrenic. Left to their own devices, the four brothers survive by breaking into ATMs. When they realise how easy a life of crime can be, they move on to bigger things. Bad Boys is based on the true story of the four Koistinen brothers, aka the "Euro-Daltons", who were sentenced in Finland for more than 100 thefts and robberies. The film heroes are a bunch of affably naive lads who have been given a raw deal in life and who never resort to violence. A delightful and touching comedy by director Aleksi Mäkelä, whose film The Tough Ones received the Interfilm Church Prize at the 1999 Nordic Film Days Lübeck."