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Released
2007 · FILM

The Matriarch

Directed by
Markku Polonen
Written by
Markku Polonen
Runtime
95 min
Language
FI
ComedyDrama

Synopsis

Martta and Otto are a pair of traveling tailors who claim to be bastard descendants of the Romanovs and wander from town to town in Finland seeking work, accompanied by their two half-witted adult sons, Hippo, Repe and equally silly son-in-law Ventti. The family occasionally turns to crime when they can't quite make ends meet, and the boys begin turning to violence with greater frequency when Otto weakens and Martta becomes the head of the family business. Their fortunes take an unexpected turn when the brothers assault and abduct a man they call Kaspar, who becomes the family's sidekick in their travels. Despite Kaspar's inability to speak, he attracts Martha's youngest daughter, an attractive young woman named Lara, but the family is in disarray when a long-lost half-brother, Laszlo, suddenly re-emerges and tries to wrest control of the clan away from his mother.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

Related titles

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 16

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Markku PolonenShot by Jan NymanScored by Vesa Makinen

Box Office

2007 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.3× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$435K

Budget$1.4M
Worldwide gross$435K
break-even (2.5×)

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