Our second guest for the 2010-11 Visiting Artist Series will be Susanna Helke.
Read about the visit at http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2010/12/02/filmmaker-pushes-boundaries-o...
The Visiting Artist Series is sponsored by Porter College.
Susanna Helke is a filmmaker and film theorist from Finland. She will be showing clips from her award winning films, “White Sky” (1998), "The Idle Ones” (2001), and showing her new project “Playground” (2010). “White Sky” offers a portrait of a Russian family trying to get by while living under the shadow of an enormous nickel plant. “The Idle Ones” follows a group of youth as they bide time in the Finnish welfare state. ”Playground” depicts scenes of global diaspora as played out in a Helsinki suburb.
Helke’s films are self-described as “replayed reality,” carefully mining fiction’s and non-fiction’s aesthetics and discourses to produce compelling portraits of contemporary, worldy life.
Susanna Helke is based in Helsinki, Finland and San Francisco. Her films, co-directed with Virpi Suutari, play with the borders of documentary and fiction, observational and reenacted documentary, and are directed in the Flahertian tradition of documentaire joué. She is currently working on a semidocumentary fiction film on young refugee boys living in the outskirts of Helsinki. Her films explore the transcendence found in everyday moments in the lives of ordinary people – a family living in the desolate wasteland of Northern Russian, young and idle men up to no good in a remote region of Finland, or Somali refugee children arguing with their Finnish friends about Allah, Jesus, and the resurrection of a mouse.
Susanna's films have been featured in various international documentary film festivals and have received several awards, including the nomination for the European Film Academy Arte award for Best Documentary, as well as the Best Scandinavian Documentary Award in the Nordisk Panorama Festival, the Best Documentary Award in the Milano Festival Internazionale, and the Best Documentary Film award in the Finnish Academy Awards. Susanna received her doctorate from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki and her dissertation was published with the title “A Trace of Nanook: Cinematic Methods Intertwining Documentary and Fictional Styles” in the Spring of 2006.