Finnish Documentary Films 2011

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”When you’ve been a part of the children’s lives, it would be wrong to just disappear. Children have such a short sense of time that if we don’t see each other for a couple of months, we have to get used to each other all over again,” Mia Halme explains. Even though the film is based on foster children, biological parents, foster parents, and caregivers, these are not the only roles the people in the film have. They are children and adults in Finland at the end of the first decade of the third millennium. How to convey essential moments to audience? ”Before becoming a film maker, I had made radio documentaries, and I had been interested in photos and photography for the longest time. I felt the need to make small works – not so much stories – but excerpts. While in film school, I felt that making short fiction was contrived. I’d love to do things that combine documentary and fiction, but when I start filming real people everything about them provides better narrative than whatever means of expression I had been planning,” director Halme says. ”I’m not interested in what is perceived as the story, even pieces of news are stories. I’m more interested in the moments in life when you realise something, or rather experience a feeling. Often it is only a glimpse of a moment, but one that nevertheless makes a lasting impression,” she says. ”It is interesting how a moment like that can be conveyed to the audience. With challenges like that, documentary films are closer to literature than to reporting information. A reporter has to always know the latest developments”. Mia Halme finds it difficult to put herself or her works into any documentary film categories. ”I’d like to make more experimental films, whatever that means. I am not a “direct cinema” director. It would be boring to be a director who always makes, for example, essayistic films. The form should be dictated by the subject of interest,” the director feels. Recently, Halme saw Into Eternity (2010) by the Danish director Michael Madsen. The film begins with the lighting of a match. The theme of a tiny flash of light and vast darkness continues throughout the film. In Halme’s opinion, the film is the perfect marriage of form and subject. It depicts the several year long construction project of a final disposal site, where nuclear waste can be stored for 100,000 years. The site is in Eurajoki in Western Finland. But how does the director create or find the right form? According to Mia Halme, the shooting must be planned Forever Yours carefully and the editing process should be given plenty of time. ”The synopsis can be poured out from your heart or soul. The subject may lose some of its fluidity when you write the script, but the editing process is what counts when you’re looking for the form. And if it’s possible to use the same cinematographer all through the shooting, it makes all the difference. It would be great if we had more cinematographers that are geared towards documentary films.” Let’s get back to Forever Yours. The director is still interested in childhood. ”I guess I haven’t grown up, even though I have three children of my own. They provide a link to my own childhood. I’ve become more like the child I was. What fascinates me in childhood is its dreamlike quality. It is a time of wisdom, when you are in touch with everything essential,” Mia Halme encapsulates. Probably one of the most significant moments in a child’s life is when they become aware of their detachment from everything else and of death. This theme is depicted wonderfully in Mia Halme’s Big Boy (Iso poika) from 2007. It is a film about a 7-year-old big brother, who can already read but wants to know if a school boy can still sit on his mother’s lap. Mia Halme remembers herself as a 9-year-old, sitting in her room on a bright summer’s night, drawing the landscape from her window. ”I felt both detached from and togetherness with the world. That was amazing.” Marja Pallassalo Forever Yours, page 15 Comedy documentaries about conquering women Tonislav Hristov has made his first feature-length documentary film Tonislav Hristov Rules of Single Life was directed by Tonislav Hristov. He has noticed that people are much more comfortable with being filmed when the director is also in front of the camera. Rules R of Single Life is Tonislav Hristov’s (born 1978) first feature-length documentary film, which he characterises as a comedy documentary. 8 Finnish Documentary Films 2011
Hristov and his three friends in the film are suffering from a chronic lack of female company. The men are in their thirties, working in Finland in fields such as information technology. Three of them are Bulgarian and one is Macedonian. Two of the men (Tonislav, Zoran) go through a divorce in the beginning, one (Kiril) has failed to persuade his girlfriend to marry him even after a ten-year relationship, and one (Hari) is used to getting dumped within two weeks. Describing his ideals in documentary film making, Hristov says: “Comedy documentaries are really hard to make. Scandinavians are good at storytelling, but Eastern Europeans are better at humour.” The director strives to combine the styles of his native country, Bulgaria, with his current home country, Finland. About his third country of residence, Germany, he says: “It’s kind of half-way, but over there they make completely different documentaries.” The guys in Rules of Single Life do not completely fail in their search for women, as Kiril ends up becoming a father and Tonislav meets Andrea, who lives in Germany. As a result, the director has spent periods of time in Germany, screenwriting his next, similarly inspired documentary. However, he intends to continue his career in Finland, saying that “Helsinki is my home where I’ve lived my entire adult life.” Not a story about foreigners, but about men and women In the film, we also meet Hristov’s actress ex-wife Nelly, who asked him to marry her back in the day – this is how things are done sometimes in Scandinavia. It was also through Nelly that Tonislav Hristov got the impulse to go into the movie business, as during a night out one of Nelly’s acquaintances, documentary director Pirjo Honka salo, asked Hristov, an engineer, to help her with some problems she had with her cameras. Hristov offered to become a technical assistant for The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), if he could in return borrow a camera for a few days. This was followed by studies in cinema and a large number of small-scale TV documentaries for the Basaari and Mundo programmes, which dealt with the issues of immigrants. These documentaries gave Hristov a chance to develop his style. “The TV clips where I was also in front of the camera came out better. It is important for me that I’m not just behind the camera. People become more open and are more willing to tell their deepest secrets. It’s like sharing with them.” Rules of Single Life His longest work before Rules of Single Life was the almost hour-long Family Fortune (2008), which Hristov filmed in Bulgaria. He was a participant in that film, too. After Bulgaria joined the EU, several upheavals took place in the country’s economy, and Hristov’s father had to start looking for “ Scandinavians are good at storytelling, but Eastern Europeans are better at humour.” a new job after 36 years of serving the same employer. Rules of Single Life contains many pertinent observations about Finland and various summer festivals. For example, when the Bulgarian men participate in a game of badminton for singles, they come face to face with a situation where the man on one side of the net works for Nokia and the woman on the other side works for Ericsson. The Bulgarians are amused: “It’s so Finland.” Hristov, however, never saw his cuttingly funny film as a story about foreigners, but rather a story about men and women. “I’ve never felt like a refugee or an outsider in Finland.” The romantic comedy documentarist notes that some viewers will most likely consider a comment about heavily drinking, non-flirtatious Finnish women to be sexist. The comment is heard from Zoran’s mouth during the episode where the four men are on a beach vacation in Bulgaria. “It is only fair to a man who has had his heart broken to give room for this kind of talk, too. Men do rational things to make themselves feel better. This section was cut out, but I felt that something was missing. The film was too nice, there was no masculinity in it. Now it’s more real. This is a guys’ film, after all.” Hristov’s next work makes fun of engineers’ love formulas The unlucky protagonists of Rules of Single Life make good-natured attempts at picking up beautiful and energetic Finnish women, but does the director plan on portraying Finnish men, too, in his films? The answer is ‘yes’, as Tonislav Hristov is currently preparing a documentary called Love and Engineering. It takes place in Finland’s second largest city, Tampere, amongst a group of engineers. Young engineers throughout the world are notorious for their bad luck with women. “My engineer friend has a theory, a Rules of Single Life mathematical formula about falling in love. It worked for him”, Hristov says as a preview of the film. “The theory is based on what you should say and do. For example, before you speak to a woman, you have to spend ten evenings at the same bar. If your favourite cake is chocolate cake, talk about brown, and so on. To me, my friend’s theory is more of a joke. I always look at even the most serious things through comedy. An engineer may say that there is something wrong with the formula. It’s never him that’s the problem. Love and Engineering is a film about miscommunication, loneliness and crazy inventions.” “Once again, I will be part of the events, as well as my grandfather’s story. He was also an engineer. His first wife escaped out of the window on their wedding night.” Jussi Karjalainen Rules of Single Life, page 21 Finnish Documentary Films 2011 9
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Page 3 and 4: Finns rush to watch documentaries a
Page 5 and 6: Mantas Kvedaravicius had spent over
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Page 11 and 12: Arctic Desert Battle for the City A
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Page 15 and 16: Forever Yours Forever Yours Ikuises
Page 17 and 18: The Hunt Kaskinen Kaskö Foundation
Page 19 and 20: Mama Africa Mama Africa Mama Africa
Page 21 and 22: Rules of Single Life Salla - Sellin
Page 23 and 24: The Unknown Woman Vesku from Finlan
Page 25: Contact information: Producers and

Finnish Documentary Films 2011

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