Finnish Film Affair 23

Prolific Finnish producer Kaarle Aho (Making Movies) discusses his urgent new doc project Truth.com with Business Doc Europe. “The film is about the use of fake news in the hybrid war that is taking place in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It is a highly topical, very important subject right now when there are forces trying to unbalance Europe on the move,” he says.

Top Finnish doccer Virpi Suutari pitched her new film to the professional audience of FFA. Fully funded and set to premiere in Spring 2024, the feature doc concerns radical young folk who are defending one of the last coniferous forest areas in Europe. “It is both a generational film that reflects the environmental feelings of the youth, and a love story of a younger generation whose object of love is the Finnish forest,” said the director.

Sibiry Konate, from a small village in Burkina Faso, moved to Finland 10 years ago to pursue his dream to be a professional choreographer. For his friends and family back home he has now become a ‘rich European’ who could solve their many problems. But nobody wants to hear the truth, that Sibiry’s life consists of numerous mundane struggles and that money is never sufficient… Producer Ella Ruohonen discusses her new project with BDE.

The industry event of Helsinki International Film Festival and a marketplace for Nordic films and Finnish series, Finnish Film Affair will once again gather hundreds of decision makers to Helsinki on 20-22 September. Presented in the showcase will be nine new feature doc projects from the likes of Virpi Suutari (Once Upon a Time in a Forest) and Truth.com by Tonislav Hristov.

Finnish producer Isabella Karhu fills in Business Doc Europe on her new feature project, about the fate of folk a 150-year-old gold mining community in the faraway Lapland wilderness, which is presented at the Helsinki showcase of Finnish docs. “Gold mining in Lapland is almost a folk-tale in Finland and this crew had the last chance to capture this way of life in its original form. No other feature doc film has been made about this community,” Karhu underlines.

Showtime in Helsinki, directed by Arthur Franck and produced by Oskar Forstén won the FFA Documentary Award, valued at €3000 and which goes towards the production of an international trailer. The film concerns the 1975 ‘Helsinki Accords’ conference, designed to bring the Cold War to an end, but which ultimately led to “the demise of the Soviet Empire and totalitarian rule in Eastern Europe.”

Mari Mantela describes her new documentary as “a hybrid between bio, fiction and documentary” and “an ode to performing arts and the necessity of rituals.” Elegiac and a feast for the eyes, it is also a film that blossoms from the existential emptiness that an actor feels during Covid to his realisation of a long-held dream, to create an old-time travelling theatre, complete with big top.