‘Stolen Hearts’ will premiere at PÖFF Shorts 2026

We are honored to announce that our film ‘Stolen Hearts’ is making its way to PÖFF this year. It will premiere at PÖFF ‘Shorts National Competition 4‘. The international short film and animation festival will take place from November 10–18. ‘Stolen Hearts’ can be seen at Kino Artis on the 12th of November. ‘Stolen Hearts’ is a short film directed by Leevi Oramo. It was photographed by Siim-Kaspar Kollamaa. The film explores boundaries between dreams, consciousness, and reality. The future is ripe with stolen hearts and dreams filled with body parts. Two dream rescuers known as Wakers attempt to rescue a boy trapped in a machine-induced dream, but something dear and dead to him comes in the way. ‘Stolen Hearts’ Director Leevi Oramo wanted to tell a story using wild cinematic expression. He said, “I felt that I could free myself from the rules of filmmaking and use an audiovisual language of my own this way. We felt free to be creative and playful with the portrayal of this story.” A lot of images came through intuition rather than a set script or plan. All the character struggles, motives, and desires were subtly, but visually played out. Oramo put it well, “If there are any clues to the depth of the characters in this genre flick, they came from the actors’ performances and our creative intuition during filming, rather than from the screenplay.” For Leevi, the Finnish video game ‘Alan Wake 2’ inspired the film’s visual language with its cinematic expression. For the atmosphere and visual language, Leevi drew influence from American filmmaker David Lynch. “I really wanted to make something Lynchian. David Lynch left a huge impression on me. I tried to be like David. I failed,” Oramo said. The film brings together different visual worlds. “We used warm, intense colors to create the sense of a beautiful dream,” Oramo said. “We thought that a black and white image and the motif of electricity fit well with the idea of a machine-induced dream-trap. I think beauty and terror make for a perfect couple.” “We had a lot of creative freedom, experimenting with blurry images and focus shifts on the set. Later in the coloring room, we spent hours manipulating the nightmare scenes to make them as gruesome as possible. So they would no longer look human,” cinematographer, Siim-Kaspar said. Our small budget helped us experiment more in post production. We could work with fading imagery and expressive sound design. As one might expect, the title, ‘Stolen Hearts’, invites several possible interpretations. While the title has a literal meaning within the story, Oramo summed up his view, “For me, stolen hearts ties in intimacy and human relationship with the intrusion of the self, robbery of the soul, and terror within beauty.” He continued, “It might refer to stolen love, or stolen lives, or something stolen by a loved one, or something stolen with love…” Written by Lotta Raidna