A total of €938,000 has been granted to five documentary features and one doc series by the Finnish Film Foundation in the latest round of funding (March 2024). The total amount of funding was €5,745,000, with additional support granted to nine fiction features and four shorts.
The supported documentaries are:
Grains of Paradise (pictured) Directors & scriptwriters: Jenni Kivistö, Jussi Rastas. Producer: Ella Ruohonen. Production company: Väki Films. Support sum: €147,000. In Grains of Paradise we encounter Sibiry from a small village in Burkina Faso who moved to Finland 10 years ago to pursue his dream of being a professional choreographer.
The Last Misfits by The Golden River (Maa) Director & scriptwriter: Juho-Pekka Tanskanen. Producer: Isabella Karhu. Production company: Danish Bear Productions. Support sum: €53,000. Following the last gold miners living in the midst of wilderness in distant Lapland, The Last Misfits by The Golden River is a film about land, generation gaps and things coming to an end.
Paradise in Hel (documentary series). Director: Mika Mattila. Scriptwriters: Mika Mattila, Nino Poppius, Dylan Pashley. Producers: Axel Högström, Satu Majava. Production company: Parad Media. Support sum: €130,000. The documentary series Paradise in Hel tells the story of mystic Ior Bock, the mythology he told, and the people who followed him. The series weaves together the three timelines: Ior’s own tragic life-story from beginning to end, the rise and fall of the Bock-Saga cult born in Goa in the 1980’s, and the rebirth of the Saga in modern times–as well as the followers’ attempts to prove its authenticity. The overarching theme of the series is new-age spiritualism and the innate human desire for connection and belief.
Perstuntuma. Director & scriptwriter: Peter Lindholm. Producers: Mika Ritalahti, Niko Ritalahti. Production company: Silva Mysterium. Support sum: €167,000
Riding with Death (Lentävä kuolema). Directors & scriptwriters: Nina Forsman, Sakari Suuronen. Producer: Markku Tuurna. Production company: Filmimaa. Support sum: €281,000. Riding with Death is a documentary film about the hidden social and emotional impacts of Tuberculosis. In this poetic film, family secrets are revealed, using unseen archives, contemporary observational cinema and dramatized expressive scenes. In order to save children from a fatal infection, they were isolated as newborn and taken into a special institution called Christmas Seal Home. That period of detachment was never talked about in the family, but left permanent scars in the children’s emotional life.
Showtime in Helsinki. Director & scriptwriter: Arthur Franck. Producers: Sandra Enkvist, Arthur Franck. Production company: Polygraf. Support sum: €160,000. Pointless kabuki theatre or an essential step towards the fall of the Iron Curtain? Showtime in Helsinki is an immersive all-archival study of perhaps the most important, and simultaneously the most forgotten, Cold War event ever to take place.
