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.
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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, explores memory-scape cinema and the complexities of ruptured histories in the wake of catastrophe, with a particular focus on Lebanon.His debut feature film, Nécrose (2024), a Lebanese-Finnish co-production, premiered in the Bright Future category at IFFR 2024. His second feature, Dark Verses, continues his exploration of "visceral cinema" and its impact on temporal and spatial perceptions, particularly in relation to memory, embodiment, and trauma. Both films are part of Trinity of Death, a three-part cinematic work interrogating death, decay, and remembrance.
François is also the founder of Corps Céleste, a collective of Lebanese artists, with Nécrose marking their first collaboration. |
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).
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Erol Mintaş
Erol Mintaş is a filmmaker and doctoral researcher at the Department of Film, Television, and Scenography at Aalto University in Helsinki. He completed his undergraduate studies in computer science and his MA in cinema, writing his thesis on Tarkovsky's cinema and existentialism in film. His artistic research, titled Cinema Without Passport, utilizes the practice of memory cinema within the context of the diaspora and addresses themes of collective trauma and counter-memory. After directing several short films and documentaries, Mintaş's debut feature fiction, Song of My Mother, won the Heart of Sarajevo Award for Best Film and Best Actor at the Sarajevo Film Festival (2014). The film went on to win fourteen awards worldwide. Mintaş's second feature fiction film, Earth Song, will have its festival premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2026). As a director and producer, Mintaş has participated in co-production markets and workshops such as Meeting on the Bridge at Istanbul FF, the CINELINK co-production market at Sarajevo FF, the NIPKOW programme in Berlin, the Film Independent-GMM programme in LA, the Mediterranean Film Institute (MFI) in Greece and the Finnish Film Affair (FFA) in Finland. In 2018, Mintaş founded the Academy of Moving People and Images (AMPI) in Helsinki for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and mobile/moving people—those who have arrived in Finland for different reasons, be they displaced people, forced immigrants, students, asylum seekers, employees, or those who immigrated for love. https://www.academyofmovingpeopleandimages.com/about/
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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).
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.
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Jani PeltonenJani Peltonen is a filmmaker and a doctoral researcher at the Department of Film at Aalto University. He has been working in the local film industry since the early 2010s. His short films have been screened at several international film festivals, including Visions du Réel, Karlovy Vary IFF, Melbourne IFF, True/False FF, Full Frame DFF, DocumentaMadrid, IndieLisboa, Edinburgh IFF, DOK Leipzig and Porto/Post/Doc. His doctoral research focuses on the possibilities of counter-archive practices in non-fiction cinema. Peltonen is currently working on a short film trilogy which approaches archival absences, materiality and performativity in the context of the Cold War and post-Soviet era. The first of the films, Equal Dust, was completed in 2025. The next two parts, Lama and Beauty Shot to Follow, are scheduled for completion in 2026 and 2027. At the same time, he is also developing his first feature film.
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.
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Katarina BlomqvistKatarina Blomqvist is an audio documentary maker and a doctoral researcher at the Department of Film at Aalto University. With an MA in Philosophy and training in philosophical practice, she explores listening as an ethical, phenomenological, and critical practice within documentary encounters. She is particularly interested in how documentary listening unfolds as a situated, relational, and temporal process that challenges extractive interview conventions.
She has worked as an artist-researcher in a multidisciplinary research group within the Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care designated by the Research Council of Finland and funded by the Kone Foundation. In recent collaborative publications with artists and social scientists, her work addresses ethical questions of epistemic injustice, vulnerability, and silencing in research practices involving older adults and people living with dementia. Her artistic and research work has been presented at conferences such as the SAR International Conference on Artistic Research, the Performance Philosophy Biennial, the Nordic Conference on Philosophical Practice, and Listening Academy. https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/katarina-blomqvist |