Tractor!

товарищ! In film school the last movie shown in my International Masterworks class (which had had its share of heavy European cinema, like Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice) was Aki Kaurismäki's Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Now, up to that point I had not had a lot of exposure to Finnish film, but what did we have to lose? In a nutshell: a Russian band takes the advice of their local kommisar to go to America (their musical qualities not being fully appreciated at home). Sporting elongated pointy shoes and hair, ill-fitting Warsaw Pact suits, and an amazing air of sangfroid, our heroes make the leap. So, packing their frozen (and assumedly dead) cousin, the group lands in New York, where they are immediately sent on a gig to play a wedding in Mexico; packed in a Cadillac with a coffin on the roof (with holes cut out for the deceased's hair, shoes and arm clutching his bass guitar in rigor). How can you not love a Finnish road movie?
A few years later, while browsing in a second-hand CD shop in Japan, I came across Leningrad Cowboys Go Space . The music can best be described as Soviet-themed rock-a-polka. Initially I thought these guys were like a Finnish-version of the Monkees - you know, a band artifically constructed to fit into a media product. Not so. They are the real deal, and they have come to play. So comrades, if you have neither watched nor heard our Finnish brothers, go forth and rectify this (you won't be sorry).