Interviews

“The ongoing success of Swedish documentaries owes a lot to co-production forums and festivals such as Nordisk Panorama,” SFI Doc Film Commissioner Anna Weitz tells BDE. “For Nordic filmmakers, the Nordisk Panorama is the one where concrete collaborations take off…it is really the place to go to pitch a project that can turn it into a Nordic co-production.”

Iris Olsson is one of two documentary commissioners at the Finnish Film Foundation. That means she is gatekeeper, assessing which projects will receive support from the Foundation. “In our strategy, we support diversity. With the means we have, we are trying to help upcoming artists to start their career; we are trying to get the international hits; we are trying to tackle the big, current subjects,” she tells BDE.

Fiction? Documentary? For prolific Danish producer Rikke Tambo Andersen, CEO of Tambo Film, both forms are equally appealing. “It’s two very different ways of thinking, both creatively but also financially,” Andersen tells BDE of the contrast between dramas and docs. “It keeps me on my toes creatively.” Andersen is at the Nordisk Panorama this week with two of her new doc projects in the Forum.

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.

Standing in My Power presents contemporary childbirth culture in Finland as seen from the perspective of two birth professionals who are fighting for a better birth experience and the rights of the birthing people. “I believe we need a film like [this] today because birth-givers’ right to self-determination is still not a given in our culture, and because many birth-givers still lack the awareness, motivation or courage necessary to demand their rights,” producer Kirsi Mattila tells BDE.

Producer Oskar Forstén (Polygraf) discusses his archive feature doc Showtime in Helsinki, about a three-day Cold War extravaganza in 1975 whose unintended consequences only became obvious three decades later. “[It] is a film that deconstructs the anatomy of an almost forgotten diplomatic process. In its essence it is Cold War history like never told before, about a conference that was considered meaningless, but that ultimately changed the world,” he tells BDE.

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.

Aida, a child on the autism spectrum, is determined to challenge existing norms and foster acceptance. But can the hard efforts of Aida and her mother Johanna change the world before their strength runs out? “Aida’s growth in the film is spectacular. We are confident that this film will engage, entertain and inform a wide range of audiences,” producer Juha Löppönen tells BDE of his new project.

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.

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.