Finnish outfit napafilms, set up by Liisa Karpo in 2009, will be giving an international premiere to its latest feature doc, Mia Halme’s People We Come Across in the International Spectrum programme at Hot Docs later in the month.
This is just one of many new projects that napafilms has on the boil, with a 2021 slate that includes Golden Land by Inka Achté, which was recently a work in progress presentation in Gothenburg, and two titles pitched at the Nordisk Panorama – Karaoke Paradise from Einari Paakkanen, and e-sport doc Game of Minds from Petri Luukkainen and Jesse Jokinen.
“My background before I set up the company was firmly in fiction film and so I have never made a conscious choice to do either/or,” the napafilms boss says of the way she mixes and matches between docs and dramatic films. “For me, it has always been first and foremost about the story and the impact of the story on me and the audiences.”
Although napafilms has enjoyed significant success with its docs, the company is currently ramping up the fiction side of the business with various dramatic shorts, series and features in active development.
One of the reasons for the pivot toward fiction is simply that Karpo is a producer who rarely stays still or repeats herself.
“I’ve been doing documentary projects for quite a while now and I also feel I like to challenge myself and find new perspectives in my work,” she explains.
Karpo is always ready to test new formats and approaches to storytelling in order, as she puts it, “to keep my thinking range wide and perception open.” She has experimented recently with interactive documentary and is always ready to embrace the new. “I’ve noticed that if I do two similar kind of projects, one after the other, I start to repeat myself in my thinking patterns and perhaps also producer patterns.”
One new doc, Karaoke Paradise, has given Karpo to explore yet further the culture of “Finnish weird”, which she considers “a genre itself.” The film (originally titled Karaoke Nation) has a memorable marketing tag line: “Finns don’t show emotions – they sing karaoke.”
“Karaoke holds a very special place in our culture,” Karpo agrees. She believes that director Einari Paakkanen’s “funny, touching” documentary will allow audiences to “see Finnish society and the Finnish soul in 70 minutes in a very unique and beautiful way.”
The film is sold by Rise And Shine and is likely to surface next year.
Another doc in a very different register is napafilms’ Golden Land by Inka Achté. This is about a Finnish-Somalian family who return to Somalia in search of a better life. “It’s extremely heart-warming, a film about reverse immigration,” Karpo suggests. Cat & Docs is handling world sales and the film is being prepared for a festival release in the autumn.
On the Hot Docs front, People We Come Across was produced for napafilms by Marianne Mäkelä. It follows several hundred Finnish tourists who travel to Benin in West Africa to assist in a tropical vaccine study. Their good intentions have some unforeseen consequences.
“It’s not a straightforward science documentary and it’s not a straightforward human issue documentary,” Karpo says of a film which wasn’t initially an easy sell to broadcasters and potential funders.
Sometimes, Karpo reflects, even films which seem like surefire crowd-pleasers can be tough to finance. Game Of Minds, about computer gamers being pushed to the limit of their abilities, will have an obvious appeal to a youth audience. It also has Rise And Shine Films on board for sales and a strong German co-producer, Corso. Even so, financiers took some persuading to support it.
Outside of “nature films and true crime documentaries,” Karpo suggests, almost every type of doc is a challenge to put together in the current marketplace.
“Definitely the production landscape has changed immensely during this time,” she adds of the changes she has witnessed first-hand since forming her company 12 years ago.
One issue is the continuing existential crisis of identity felt by the broadcasters who weren’t (and aren’t) sure what the future held/holds for them in the brave new world of the streamers. “We all know now that they [the broadcasters] are not dying and TV is not disappearing anywhere, but it has changed a lot. I find there is less room for variety…there is more and more pressure on what projects they take. They tend to make decisions later and later all the time.”
With the broadcasters less reliable, producers are increasingly looking to big Nordic funds.
As yet, napafilms hasn’t worked closely with the major VOD companies. “Everybody dreams of the big deal with the streaming companies and having projects very quickly financed,” Karpo acknowledges, but points out that such deals remain rare. “They [streamers] haven’t taken as a big a role yet as producers are hoping they will take. So far, the streaming platforms are still seen [as being for] after sales. With the big platforms like HBO and Netflix, it’s perhaps challenging to meet them at an early enough stage.”
Karpo is seeing more and more representatives from both the big platforms and their smaller counterparts turning up at pitching events. She is hopeful therefore that they will become involved in documentaries at an earlier point in future.
The napafilms founder began her career as a marketing assistant working on fiction movies, and her subsequent expertise within this essential discipline has become “a big asset” in her “toolbox as a producer.”
“You have to be very savvy and think about the audiences and the marketing from the very beginning,” Karpo declares.
She is always ready to challenge old-fashioned thinking about distribution and to come up with new ways to find audiences. “Certainly with documentary films, it’s not an easy solution that you go, ok, just put it in cinemas. The audience doesn’t work like that…the traditional thinking about windows is being demolished,” she underlines, adding. “I really hope that the whole world, including Finland, will be ready for fresh ideas regarding windows.”
“It’s extremely intriguing, how do you find audiences [through] marketing,” she further reflects. “To me, it is like a maths equation. You can kind of calculate that if you do this and you do that, the result should be this – but there is always the x factor that you cannot anticipate.”
