Border Breaking and Provocation

The DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival programme includes many films that deliberately use provocation to expose something that would otherwise remain hidden. The festival programme also features films dealing with immigration and cultural borders, as well as the Winners & Bestsellers series comprising the most successful documentaries of the festival circuit. DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival will take place on the 26th - 31st of January 2010.

The End Justifies the Means series is all about films where the documentarist doesn't settle for mere observation and recording, but becomes an active element. This sometimes rough approach aims to go beneath the surface. Renzo Martens' Episode 3 - Enjoy Poverty turns the reasoning behind charity upside down, while Mads Brügger shows the world's worst improv troupe struggling in North Korea in The Red Chapel. The makers of Stolen don't pull any punches in trying to expose the best kept secret of refugee camps, slavery. In Bassidji openly liberal Tamadon Mehran is confronted with an Iranian islamistic militia group, while Erik Gandini couples Italian politics and the entertainment industry in Videocracy.

The films of the Arrivals series tackle issues of immigration and life between two cultures. The winner of the Best Documentary award at Germany's DOK Leipzig The Arrivals shows employees and clients of a reception centre in Paris struggling towards a better future. The massive proportions of internal immigration in China are the issue in the Amsterdam IDFA Grand Prix winner Last Train Home - a movie that shows the greatest movement of population in the world as 130 million Chinese city dwellers travel to the countryside for the New Year.

Borders are the focus of the Defining Borders and Taking Risks seminar as well, where altruistic charity work takes the stand - even if laws work against immigrants, the homeless and prostitutes, citizens can work for them. What may appear as civil disobedience to some may well be compassion to someone else. The seminar, organised in collaboration with Into Kustannus and Demos Helsinki, is open to all and will take place on the 30th of January at 12 am.

The Winners & Bestsellers series includes the winner of the European Film Academy Documentary - Prix Arte Award, The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy, which tells, through his diaries, the story of a man who decided to starve himself to death. The Most Dangerous Man in America presents Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the top secret Vietnam report to the public in 1971, throwing political life into the turmoil of the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon. Presumed Guilty, on the other hand, is the film leading to the release of José Rodriguez from prison, to which he had been sentenced despite his innocence. Byambasuren Davaa, who's The Story of the Weeping Camel touched us all, comes back with his new piece, The Two Horses of Genghis Khan, the journey of a musician to her roots in the plains of Mongolia.

DocPoint's Aho & Soldan Award Goes To Director Kiti Luostarinen

DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival is proud to present documentarist Kiti Luostarinen, winner of the Aho & Soldan Life Achievement Award for her long, successful career. The festival will honour the awardee by screening a selected retrospective of her work. The award will be handed out to Luostarinen during the opening ceremony at the Bio Rex cinema on Tuesday, the 26th January at 6:30 pm.

The Aho & Soldan Award has been handed out by DocPoint since the festival's first year in 2002 as a tribute to pioneering Finnish documentarists Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan. Criteria for receiving the award include a remarkable life's work, contributing to the Finnish creative documentary film and a successful long-lasting career as a documentary film director.  The previous award winners are Markku Lehmuskallio (2002), Lasse Naukkarinen (2003), Pirjo Honkasalo (2004) and Peter von Bagh (2005).

Kiti Luostarinen studied social psychology and pedagogics, but through her hobbies in painting and poetry, was driven towards making movies in the early 1990s. Throughout her career, Luostarinen has, in her own very personal style, dealt with themes, relating to the most universal, as well as the most intimate moments in human life; her works are united by her curiosity and her immense respect for life. Luostarinen's documentaries offer the viewers a unique opportunity to look at the significant moments of their own life and to identify emotions of their own.

Q&A and live performance:

Kiti Luostarinen, winner of the Aho & Soldan Award Kiti Luostarinen will tell of her work and answer questions from the audience at the screening of her films Omat askeleet and Kodinkonetanssi at Ateneum-sali. During this special event, dancer Ulla Koivisto will perform her act from Kodinkonetanssi live.