Documentaries

Dear Mother is about sixteen year old Tasha who lives at an orphanage in Kandalaksha, N.W Russia. One day an unknown woman calls her and claims that she is her mother. Tasha is shocked since the authorities had declared her mother dead by a drug overdose several years ago, but her body was never recovered.

The secret at the heart of this film is in Tasha’s forgotten hometown Lujaur. Different native tribes where relocated to this swamp on the middle of the tundra by the Soviet authorities. The objective was to create a utopian society where a new breed of socialistic humans would emerge. Instead many natives where abused in the name of progress. It’s a story about buried secrets and the search for identity, the universal need to understand why our families turn out the way they do.

Future Remains is a documentary about the power of idealism through the story of Henrik Wahlforss, an industrial designer who believed design can change the future.

The film progresses though the power of music, dance, performance and depiction of everyday life. Gaining your daily subsistence, the ordinary life is the central source for music and other kinds of self-expression. It is life itself breathing. The cultures depicted in the film are the Chukchi, Alaskan and Canadian Inuit, the Sayisi Dene people of Canada, Greenlanders, Sámi, Nenets, Selkups and Nganasans.

School of Hope tells about a nomad tribe struggling to get education for their children, and a young teacher trying to help them while suffering himself of the Government’s indifference toward rural regions.

Climate change and overgrazing have brought poverty to the old nomad tribes of the High Plateau of Atlas in Morocco and forced them to partial settlement. Now faced with the changing environment and the necessity to settle down, they feel more lost than when wandering with their cattle in the endless desert. They’d need wells, electricity, health care and schools, but the Government is not interested in their troubles.

When the Dehbi tribe couldn’t get a State school to their area, they decided to build it themselves, and through an association managed to get a teacher to come there. The small school can only offer the first elementary classes, after which the children should move to town to continue studying. Even if the family might be able to afford sending a child there, they don’t want to send the girls, worried of their safety. The situation is complex; the nomads know they need education but are also afraid of it, afraid of losing their children.

A prismatic meditation on pollution in the capital of the World’s biggest free-market democracy and the most polluted and populated city, Delhi – a film about the pollution inside of the human mind.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ internal judicial committee concluded that Josefina, 11 years old, had seduced her abuser, because “an adult wouldn’t touch a child that way.” Josefina believed she was guilty and remained silent. Until now. 25 years later she relives her traumas by reconstructing scenes from her childhood with other former Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Walk the Tideline is a film about the traces we leave behind us. It follows beachcombers at shores trying to find treasures. Between the people the film drifts out to the unknown oceans and shows us the diverse system of ocean currents, how they carry and swirl our history in small pieces. 

Ruthless Times – Songs of Care is a documentary-material based film, partly using a choir song element in portraying the future challenges of the elderly care sector. 

Kelet is based in Finland, far away from her family in Manchester. Her life in Finland is sometimes lonely, in spite of Lola, another Somali transwoman who is her roomie, soulmate, and best friend. Being a black transwoman in Finland is not easy: racism and transphobia are deeply rooted in Finnish society.

Lost Boys is a documentary about damnation – about three men lost in a drug hell, defeated in the game of life, disappearing into the streets of Cambodia. Of the three, Jani is known as the main character of the documentary Reindeerspotting – Escape from Santaland (2010) and Joonas as its director. The main character of Lost Boys is Joonas himself.

The naked real life story full of sex, drugs and death tells us what happened ten years ago when these friends enjoying the never-ending after party following the success of the opening of the film Reindeerspotting that depicts drug users in Rovaniemi, change from immortal to mortal. The party comes to an end when Jani dies a violent death in Phnom Penh.

In the film Lost Boys, Joonas’ camera takes the viewer into the dizzying noise of Bangkok and the alleys of night-time Phnom Penh, to the last weeks of Jani’s life and the desperate search following his disappearance and death. What happened on the journey?

Can the answer be found in the videos shot by Joonas or in something that has yet to be investigated and faced, filmed or told? Is it all about drugs, women and money or does the trail lead somewhere deeper?

Someone knows something. Joonas is looking for his friends and the local women with whom they partied and with whom they shared whatever they had to share. Joonas must find his own truth about what happened among the drugs and the gloom. There are no heroes there.