For a filmmaking duo whose calling cards were festival prizes rather than ticket sales, “100 Litres of Gold” was the wall that finally gave way. The dark comedy about two sisters brewing sahti, the juniper-spiced farmhouse beer of rural Finland, became the country’s most-watched domestic release, was picked as Finland’s Oscar submission and caught Hollywood’s eye. Now director Teemu Nikki and producer Jani Pösö are building something neither of them planned on: a franchise.

As Variety first reported, the sequel is titled “200 Litres of Gold”, and Nikki has already sketched its stakes. “In the first one, the sisters were making sahti for their sister’s wedding. Now, they are making it for the Finnish Sahti Championship,” he said. To win, the siblings have to tolerate each other and beat rival brewers, not to mention their father. Elina Knihtilä and Pirjo Lonka return as Pirkko and Taina, and the production has released a first-look photo.

The escalation is literal. A pair of sahti makers from another village arrive as the sisters’ new nemeses, “two ladies who are as crazy as our sisters,” in Nikki’s words, bringing “a lot of trash-talking and arm-wrestling.” The family relationships, he adds, are “even more complex than before.”

Pösö sums up the sequel as “a little bit darker, a little bit funnier and a little bit bigger,” and the darker part is not a figure of speech: one of the sisters is in poor health, her liver “basically exploded.” As in all of the pair’s films, he says, things get “pretty serious in the end, even though it’s fun.” The new film is built to stand alone, so audiences can watch it without having seen the first.

Lonka frames her return around what the role gave her. The sisters are “vulnerable, flawed and sometimes childlike,” she said, and getting a role like that was liberating: “It doesn’t happen very often for women.”

Nikki and Pösö’s company, It’s Alive Films, already had a respectable shelf: “The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic”, awarded in Venice, their first Oscar submission “Euthanizer”, and Naima Mohamud’s “Halima”. None came close to the box office of “100 Litres of Gold” (original title “100 litraa sahtia”), the most-watched local film in Finland in 2025. Its reach already extends abroad: Dennis Lehane, the novelist behind “Mystic River”, is working on a U.S. remake.

Pösö insists they are “not sequel guys.” What won him over was Nikki’s pitch that he was thinking of the new film as “The Godfather,” and “‘The Godfather Part II’ was better than the first one.” And the round after this one? “A third one is certainly possible.”

Tags: 100 Litres of Gold, 200 Litres of Gold, Elina Knihtilä, sequel, Teemu Nikki

Director Teemu Nikki pours ‘200 Litres of Gold’, turning Finland’s beer-comedy hit into a franchise

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