A Low-Budget War Film by Marjo Niemi is travelling to Italy, where it will be published by Cue Press
Finlandia nominee A Low-Budget War Film by award-winning author Marjo Niemi is starting its journey out into the world: Cue Press has secured the Italian rights, marking the first foreign rights deal for this title.
A Low-Budget War Film follows a highly educated city-dweller as she heads back to her run-down, post-industrial hometown after her father’s death, and finds herself an outsider: she no longer belongs to the place she grew up in, but she doesn’t feel at home in the new social setting she lives in, either. Stuck in between social classes, and torn by social tensions, the narrator finds that it’s surprisingly hard to find a place in the world even in the country of equal opportunities.
A Low-Budget War Film is not the kind of working-class novel where the spirit of the united grows into a collective force. Instead, it shows with a generous dose of dark humor how class identity is fragmented into individual pursuits, and the shame is inherited through generations. The novel was nominated for the Finlandia Prize, the largest and most prestigious in the country, in 2025.
Marjo Niemi is an award-winning author and playwright. Mother of All Losses (2017) won the Runeberg Prize and Hearing (2021) was nominated for the Finlandia Prize. A Low-Budget War Film is her sixth novel, published in Finland by Teos.
Cue Press is an independent publishing house based in Imola, northern Italy, and specialised in theatre plays and the works of playwrights. Their list includes an ambitious selection of Italian and international fiction and plays. They notably were the Italian publisher of Jon Fosse before his Nobel Prize win.
Warmest greetings to the author and the publishers, and don’t miss out on this title!