It’s certainly surreal, the sun blazing at midnight in Lapland, home of a zillion lakes. Buzzed on 120-proof Finnish vodka, I’m jumping into one of them after my sauna. And who’s that bearded naked man in a towel on the sauna porch? It’s Francis Ford Coppola, another high-and-happy camper. Earlier, attired, he led the gathered in an off-key rendering of "Avanti popolo" and then solo’d on "God Bless America." Welcome to a VIP party at last month’s Midnight Sun Film Festival, where Coppola was a special guest along with three other outstanding directors: Hungary’s Miklós Jancsó, Argentina’s Fernando Solanas, and Quebec’s Denys Arcand.

This was the rare private occasion for which the filmmakers were whisked away from the five-day fest. Ordinarily, they mixed with the movie crowds; Coppola even tango’d at an open-to-everyone merriment. And as if blonde Finnish dance partners weren’t enough, the Godfather cinéaste was won over by a retrospective that reclaimed such neglected works as Tucker and Gardens of Stone. A fest organizer noted, "It was pretty obvious that Coppola was happy"; he never even complained about being boarded in the dim, no-frills fest hotel.

Sixteen years ago, three Helsinki-based filmmakers (Timo Malmi and Aki and Mika Kaurismäki) envisioned a utopian European festival, and they’d been at enough bad ones to realize what they didn’t want. "The filmmakers use limousines and stay at five-star hotels, and the people attending never talk to them," Mika elaborated. There was an American model: the Telluride Fest in Colorado. There, guests speak informally at seminars and mill with the movie-crazed crowds, and emerging directors and veteran "auteurs" are honored equally with showings of their works.

Telluride is one thing, but how to lure world-class filmmakers to Finland? "A festival in Helsinki would be too normal," Mika said. "We wanted something strange." A search ended in Lapland, a 12-hour drive north of Helsinki, in the tiny municipality of Sodankyla, where the mayor of the town (known for alcoholism, suicides, unemployment, and coal-dark winters) was eager for business.

The Kaurismäkis saw possibilities in this three-street, one-moviehouse spot. It’s geographically exotic, 100 kilometers above the Arctic Circle. Each June, transcendence: the sun shines 24 hours a day and the weather is T-shirt warm. The Midnight Sun Film Festival was born in 1987. Come one, come all, to the north-by-north Lappish polar region, where reindeer roam free, where the sun never goes away. For flown-in filmmakers: a major selection of your movies, new and old, projected around the clock.

"The first festival was very improvised, but it was magical," Mika recalled. "Young, old, locals, famous, filmmakers, journalists, all on the same level, a very nice feeling, this festival in the middle of nowhere." A mammoth circus tent was raised as a second screening space, with a 35mm booth, and the festival’s guests, French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (Round Midnight) and American cult director Sam Fuller (The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor), were complimented with screenings of many of their films.

What serendipity! Tavernier and Fuller might be the most garrulous filmmakers ever, both famous for talking everyone into exhaustion. Midnight Sun festgoers got all the conversation they could desire. "Sam never slept," said Mika. "On the street, if you saw the cigar smoke, you knew Fuller was there, talking about movies."

Fuller came into the picture in 1972, when he was visited in his LA home by Finnish film critic Peter von Bagh, who’s now the Midnight Sun’s artistic director. Self-exiled in Paris in the 1980s, he readily accepted the invitation for the first Midnight Sun Fest. "How did we find the money?" Bagh marveled. "How in no time did we have fantastic Cinemascope prints of Fuller’s House of Bamboo and China Gate? Sam immediately became a great friend of the Kaurismäki brothers, appearing in Mika’s film Tigrero and Aki’s La vie de bohème. He was all over the place at Sodanklya, joking and clowning, a talking machine. He gave a tone to the place."

Filmmaker guests since have included Michael Powell, Krzysztof Kie<t-75>´<t$>slowski, Wim Wenders, and Terry Gilliam. And I’m honored to be the third American film critic invited there, following the Village Voice’s Jim Hoberman and the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum. Still, there was only one Sam Fuller, and, after his 1997 death, a Sodankyla street was named after him: "Samuel Fuller’s Street/Samuel Fullerin Katu." Looking at the street sign, I imagined cruel February in frozen Lapland: Sam and the reindeer. Surreal.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com