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PRODUCTION / FUNDING Finland

The Finnish Film Foundation sets Good Life goals by awarding over €1 million in production support

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- Two feature-length fiction films, as well as four feature-length and two short documentaries, have received production support from the FFF in October

The Finnish Film Foundation sets Good Life goals by awarding over €1 million in production support
Good Life by Marta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė (© Elisabeth Marjanović Cronvall)

The Finnish Film Foundation (FFF) awarded over €1 million in production support this October, with the money going to two feature-length fiction films, as well as four feature-length and two short documentaries – this time including three minority co-productions. Firstly, the Dionysos Films production 70 Is Just a Number has been backed to the tune of €700,000. It is being written and directed by Johanna Vuoksenmaa, recently seen entertaining local audiences with the 2015 comedy Adult Camp [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
. Another feature, Sagres – a minority co-production set to be helmed by Lovisa Síren and produced by Siri Hjorton Wagner – will be overseen by the omnipresent Tuffi Films and supported with €100,000.

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In the documentary field, the shorts Best Possible Life, directed by Jussi Sandhu and Ville Hakonen (Wacky Tie Films), and Anna Blom’s Yvonne – The Woman, the Myth, the Legend (Ja Media Production) received €20,000 and €10,000, respectively. Dinosaurus by Veikko Aaltonen, produced by Mark Lwoff and Misha Jaari, of Bufo, stomped off with €110,000, and Solitary Dance, directed by Antti Lempiäinen and produced by Ella Ruohonen, of Superreel Productions, waltzed away with €75,000.

“I’m extremely happy that the Finnish Film Foundation chose to support Guy Davidi’s documentary Innocence [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guy Davidi
film profile
]
(working title: Senseless),” Making MoviesKaarle Aho told Cineuropa about the minority co-production that has been backed with €40,000, and which has also been developed with the help of producers Sigrid Dykjaer and Hilla Medailla. “Now, we have strong support from all three Finnish financiers, including Yle and AVEK, and we can help our Danish and Israeli friends to make a great film. I’m a fan of Guy Davidi’s previous work [including the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
], and it’s great to be able to get Heikki Kossi from Finland to work with him as a sound designer,” he added. “And as for the topics of the film, military service, militarisation and suicide, they are not completely unfamiliar to us Finns either.”

Good Life, written and directed by Marta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė, also seems like an interesting proposition, produced by Niklas Kullström, Mirjam Gelhorn, Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė and the directors themselves, with Finnish outfit Hillstream Pictures lending a hand. Bolstered with €18,000, it revolves around – as Cineuropa found out – a case study on a co-living start-up: a place where people can rent a sleeping pod to take part in non-stop networking, self-management and personal development. “Good Life exposes the supposedly flat power relations between the start-up founders, investors and residents, and questions the process of corporate storytelling becoming part of one’s innermost self,” argued Marta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė. “Like most cultural workers, we are also nomadic and entrepreneurial; we live at our workplace and we work from our beds. We see this co-living start-up as a metaphor, or a final frontier, where the entrepreneurial attitude is invading our whole existence. Everyday life comes down to survival strategies against constant dissolution, demanding new tactics to be grasped again and again with the same high level of energy and enthusiasm.”

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