French spy movie being filmed in Finland

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It's quite like old times. A French spy movie is being filmed in Rovaniemi in Lapland this week. Shooting the film will continue in Helsinki at the beginning of December. Farewell is based on real events that took place in the early 1980s.
      The announced cast includes Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet and Willem Dafoe.
      Whether the stars will appear in the scenes shot in Finland or not was not verified yesterday. Nikita Mihalkov was earlier reported as having withdrawn from the project.
     
The director of the film is the French movie-maker Christian Carion, whose most famous film to date is Joyeux Noël (2005), a fact-based film about a one-day truce on Christmas Eve in 1914 between the German, French, and Scottish World War One soldiers.
      Finnish director Claes Olsson is to be responsible for the scenes shot in Finland.
     
The film has been prepared for quite some time. Variety magazine wrote about the film’s fund-raising efforts already two years ago.
      At that time the magazine also shed some light on what the film is about. The year of the events is 1980.
      Soviet spies managed to obtain important military and industrial secrets from the West, until the French intelligence service informed the Americans of what was going on. A counter operation was launched, which included feeding the Russians with misinformation.
      A central informer was the late KGB officer Vladimir Vetrov, whose western code name was "Farewell". The operation’s aftermath included, among other things, the blowing up of a gas pipeline in Siberia in 1982.
      “It was the most important reason for the fall of the Berlin wall”, the film’s producer told Variety.
     
Finland is no stranger to serving as a backdrop for spy movies, although the genre has been somewhat overtaken by events and the end of the Cold War.
      Helsinki has regularly been dressed up to serve as St. Petersburg [Leningrad] or Moscow, and in the case of the film version of Len Deighton's Billion Dollar Brain (1967), it was even allowed to play itself.


Links:
  Christian Carion (Internet Movie Database)
  Claes Olsson (Internet Movie Database)

Helsingin Sanomat