Boy flees with girl. A visually told story of love, escape, hope, violence and survival. They Have Escaped is a contemporary road movie. A love story about marginalized people. A trip through a dark reality. Two youths in search of a better world. This world that is straight from the stories of the Brothers Grimm meets the vicious world of today where the weaker ones in society are irreversibly becoming lost.

SYNOPSIS
A boy and girl meet at a custody center for problematic youth. The boy has come to serve his obligatory civil service. The girl is one of the youths in custody, and she is constantly in trouble, a fire inside her, a lust for life that can’t be quashed or controlled. The boy becomes infatuated with her. He is a quiet one – a stutterer. But there is a fire inside him as well. Rules, laws, punishment – the shackles of a hostile, uncompromising environment around them – can be broken. They steal a car and flee together. Thus begins a journey on an endless road with infinite escapes

About the director:
Currently living in Helsinki, Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää (1977, Finland) made two award-winning short films, Eyes Closed Without Hands (2000) and The Fall (2003) as a student. In 2005, Valkeapää was selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Résidence du Festival programme to develop the script for The Visitor, his debut project as a director. Presented at CineMart 2006, upon completion The Visitor premiered in Venice Days at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. The Visitor won the Nordic Film Award, the first prize of the Gothenburg Film Festival in 2009.