Susanna HelkeSusanna Helke is an Associate Professor and the director of the Critical Cinema Lab at the Department of Film at Aalto University. She is an award-winning filmmaker and theorist whose films (Ruthless Times -Songs of Care 2022, American Vagabond 2013, Playground 2010, Along the Road Little Child 2005, The Idle Ones 2001, White Sky 1998, Sin 1995) have been screened and awarded at major international film festivals, including Locarno IFF Critics' Week (Zonta Club Award 2022), IDFA, Chicago IFF(Q Hugo Jury Special Prize 2013), Visions du Réel, Hotdocs Toronto, as well as in special screenings (e.g. IDFA master series, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the Tate Modern, and The Art Institute, Chicago). Her work on the theory-praxis interface examines the intersection of the poetics and politics of documentary cinema in dialogue with, for example, contemporary political philosophy and critical theory. Helke led the Kone foundation funded artistic research project Images of Harmony and Rupture 2015-2022. Her recent publications address critically the questions of, for example, emotive turn in Finnish and Scandinavian documentary film as well as poetics of rupture as a political address in documentary. Her doctoral thesis Nanookin jälki [A Trace of Nanook ](2006), discussed contemporary cinema methods on the borders of ‘documentary’ and ‘fictional’ film.
|
|
François YazbeckFrançois Yazbeck is a Lebanese sound designer, film director, doctoral researcher and musician based in Helsinki, Finland. His artistic doctoral research project Ruptured Memories - Visceral Cinema as a Counter-Memory Political Stance delves into the realm of memory-scape cinema, facing the complexities of ruptured histories in the face of catastrophes, with particular look into Lebanon. In his film Dark Verses Yazbeck experiments how "visceral cinema" can shape temporal and spatial perceptions, influencing our understanding of memory and embodiment facing ruins and traumas. |
Danai Anagnostou
Danai Anagnostou is a producer for film and artist moving images, and a doctoral researcher at Aalto University. In 2019, she co-founded Kenno Filmi, a production company in Helsinki that hosts projects by international filmmakers, researchers, and artists www.kennofilmi.com. Her research is situated at the intersection of production studies and production history, emphasizing the histories of feminist film collectives and collaborations. It aims to identify methods and practices for creating and showcasing unofficial archives created by counter-cinema practitioners and examines their filmmaking practices. She is conducting this study with the support of the Kone Foundation (2022-2026). She has been awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by Artworks (2022-2023), the Audiovisual Women Fellowship by the Erich Pommer Institut (2023-2024), and has been selected for the Emerging Producers program (2025).
|
Erol Mintaş
|
Jouko AaltonenJouko Aaltonen is a documentary filmmaker, researcher and teacher. He is a Doctor of Arts, Adjunct Professor (Docent) and visiting researcher at the Department of Film at Aalto University. He has published several articles and five books. Jouko is an active film director and producer, and has directed about 20 documentaries for national and international distribution, several of them awarded (see: www.illume.fi). Aaltonen’s resent research projects have focused on documentary film practices from the media ecology perspective (e.g. Aaltonen, J., Kääpä, P., & Sills-Jones, D. 2023. Documentary in Finland: History, Practice and Policy. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien: Peter Lang).
|
|
Reetta Huhtanen
Reetta Huhtanen is a filmmaker based in Helsinki. She graduated with a Masters of Arts from the ELO Film School at Aalto University majoring in documentary directing. In addition to film, she has studied Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Her films, The Coffee Break, about three eternal students, and Economic Forecasters, an absurdist look into the inscrutable world of economics, have been widely exhibited at international film festivals. At the moment she is finishing a feature length documentary film “The Mercurius of Molenbeek”, a story about a six-year-old boy who wants to find his own god in a world shaken by suicide bombings. Her doctoral research focuses on absurdist strategies in art and documentary film.
|
Salla SorriIn her artistic research, Salla Sorri examines a semi-documentary filmmaking method based on gathering extensive personal interview material on stigmatized experiences. She explores questions related to indirect witnessing in film in conditions where the original witnesses are absent, hidden or replaced by someone else. The artistic component is a feature length fiction film in which the script is based on material from a teenager’s rape trial, “Selfie of Femida”. The theoretical part of her research builds upon contextualizing her approach in relation to the methods of other contemporary filmmakers within the tradition of semi-documentary fiction film, documentary theatre, trauma psychology, and Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of ethics as the first philosophy, the Other and the face.
|