Misha Jaari and Mark Lwoff met in film school, and then co-founded the production company Bufo in Helsinki in 2007 - they cooked up the idea along with some chanterelle mushrooms left over from a film production. In the years since, they have worked on notable films, including Pirjo Honkasalo’s Concrete Night (Betoniyö), Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), and Khadar Ayderus Ahmed’s Somalia-set The Grave­digger’s Wife (Guled & Nasra). For 2026, they produced Finland’s current Oscar submission, The Squirrel (Orava), directed by Markus Lehmusruusu, and genre holiday title Red Snow (Punaista lunta), directed by Ilja Rautsi - both films recently played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

Lwoff, speaking in the new episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast series, says they are driven by a shared passion for films. “We have an enormous flaw; that we both like films,” he jokes. Jaari adds that “making film is a miracle, and it’s so much fun to make it possible for people around you…and sometimes the film surprises you”.

For The Squirrel, the team used real squirrels on set as well as a naughty Japanese robot dog, to tell a story about a man rebelling in a future society without animals. “It’s a film about the last animal in the world. But the film is not dark and sad, we wanted to have a light approach with it,” Lwoff says. “This world is controlled, then this guy finds happiness by breaking rules and becoming independent. You take that away from the story the way you want it. It was fascinating to us to build a world in the future.”

Of Red Snow, which will launch on leading horror streaming platform Shudder in December, Lwoff says: “We always wanted to make a vampire film. We understood that no one has ever made a Christmas Santa Claus vampire film, so that was our destiny.”

Jaari explains that they worked with Rautsi on his short Helsinki Mansplaining Massacre, and wanted to get behind his first feature as a director. “He said his idea was about a middle-aged vampire who cannot get into houses, so he disguises himself as a for-hire Santa Claus. He gets into houses during Christmas.” The producers were sold on the pitch immediately - “no questions asked”. The journey of making the film took eight years - they remember pitching it at Bucheon International Film Festival (BIFAN) in Korea back in 2018. Lwoff says: “I think you can feel watching the film that people had fun making it.”

They say the competition for film funding in Finland has increased in recent years, but they also like the more intimate size of the industry. As Jaari says: “If I don't know some people, at least I know what they've done, or I know with whom they worked. Because the size is manageable, even if you are competing [for public funding], we all can embrace common issues and problems. We may have different solutions to those problems. We are not necessarily on different sides of the table, we are in the same creek, and that’s beautiful.”

In 2013, they added B-Plan as a distribution company to sit along the production outfit, which has taught them more about audiences - they are seeing Finnish audiences trending older and more female-led. Jaari says: “It’s not anymore a place where you go to your first date.” They enjoy predicting box office results for other companies’ Finnish releases, but they say that’s harder with their own films. “You are blind when it’s your own child.”

Jaari and Lwoff say they start every project with good faith and excitement “that everybody should see this is a good project”, as Jaari says, “But the target audience gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Time has taught us that the big disappointment always happens because you are forever optimistic. It’s like betting, you always think that the odds are wrong.”

Lwoff adds: “We always go with the content first, it’s all about the script, and it’s about the people. We have to actually really believe that we can make it happen.”

They recently had to mentally recover from The Squirrel’s disappointing box-office performance. Jaari explains: “You think you have something meaningful or something worthwhile to show, and when nobody shows up, it's one of the most depressing feelings you can get.”

Lwoff says he got over his own depression with The Squirrel’s numbers by getting back into Red Snow. “There’s something happening all the time, and I like to do things,” he says of staying busy. “It was important that I could do something, and not just sit at the office being depressed.” Sometimes, of course, there is good news - Fallen Leaves was projected to get to 100,000 admissions, and ended up nearing 300,000.

In the full podcast episode, they also talk about how Aki Kaurismäki is a “walking encyclopedia”, and why they opened a bar near their office.