Susanna Helke

A choir of tired nurses sing to Anna-Mari Kähärä’s hypnotic tunes about the truths of everyday nursing work in a musical documentary directed by Susanna Helke and co-scripted by Helke and Markku Heikkinen. DocPoint’s opening film is new in its format, and jolting in its message. It is a cinematic-musical work of activism, calling for more humane work, life and old age.

The Idle Ones is a profile of contemporary affairs - somewhere on the edge of Europe - in a place where unemployment for some young people is fast becoming a way of life. Covering a period of 18 months, the film follows the activities of a group of young men in their 20s who have finished their schooling and stayed in their home village - they loaf about unemployed since they can´t find any work in the remote district. The main characters are more or less idle young fellows whose stories link together and make up the film. Tinged with humour, The Idle Ones is a story about frustrated but vital young people in a period of transition, waiting for something to happen. For some, the waiting is becoming their life.

​​American Vagabond is a documentary film about runaway queer youth living in the shadows of the promised city.

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The Kurppa family lives in a pastel-toned Finnish suburb. Kari dreams of striking it rich by selling soap and vitamins; his wife, Pirjo, pregnant with their fourth child, aspires to be a model. Their kids—Jani (6), Jonna (4), Sonja (3)—join them in their cluttered home. With limited work and lives spent mostly indoors, every day feels like an endless chaotic Sunday.

10 Letters to the Future is a documentary film that is a mid-term review in a world of intertwined crises. It is a puzzle, a kaleidoscope that enables a multi-voiced debate in society. The collectively made film was conceived in the era of the Coronavirus, when the reality of global anomalies pierced everything we took for granted. It was a time that caused many to reassess their lives in a new light. What happened to us and what kind of future do we want to be heading towards? Virus researcher, climate activist, political scientist and anti-vaccine protesters see the future challenges facing our society in a very different light. As the virus takes over the world, schoolchildren start collecting letters to be encapsulated in a wooden coffin built by students to be opened more than 50 years from now. The main characters in the documentary write their letters, addressing their loved ones or something unknown in the future.

The story of the friendship, shared games and conversations between Finnish and Somali children in a suburb of Vantaa in 2004.

A glance across the border in northern Russia, where the small town of Montegorsk suffers under the heavy metal from industry. Nature is transformed into a poisonous desert: in long shots the camera probes the pale, skeleton-like branches of the dead trees. The small family, whose everyday life Helke and Suutari follow, lives in a state of waiting: waiting for the next German car, the next medical examination, the next holidays. White Sky exemplifies the artists‘ approach with currents of time flowing together: no one can say how long it will take for nature to regenerate itself here; yet people live here in their own time, with their own individual wishes and expectations.

Synti, is a wry film about themes like sense of guilt, sin and the role that morality plays in choices that people make every day. By setting day-to-day events against the background of the seven mortal sins: pride, wrath, jealousy, lechery, stinginess, idleness and gluttony.