MAIN SERIES

SPRING 1997

SUMMER 1997 - twenty documentaries about the history of the Finnish nation

1.1. HOOP DREAMS (180 min)

Director Steve Williams, USA, 1994
A highly praised documentary about two African-American teenagers striving to become professional basketball players. Iner-city, poor, black communities, seen as 'jungles' by many Americans, become in this filma zone white film makers have crossed boundries to enter, to document their subject.

8.1. PEACEFUL EXIT ((50 min)

Directors Ian Stuttard and Alma Taft
Left brain damaged after an operation, two-year Ian Stewart is in pain day and night and not expected to reach his teens. His parents, who have sacrificed their careers to care for Ian, feel his quality of life is negligible. This film records both their tragic situation and the moral dilemma they face: is euthanasia the answer?

15.1. LASSE PÖYSTI (60 min)

Director Lisa Hovinheimo, 1996

22.1.CAROLINE'S BABY (54 min)

Director Nick Catliff, BBC
In September 1994, 30-year-old Londoner Caroline Beale was stopped at a routine security search at New York's JFK Airport. Inside her shoulder bag was a dead baby girl. Caroline, who had a severe mental illness at the time, insisted that the infant was still-born. But her fate rested with a New York jury who had to decide whether she needed treatment or a life sentance.

29.1. DADERS (55 min)

Director Hans Otten, Netherland, 1995
Daders in based on extensive interviews on audiotape with three people who have commited incest, and who have been convicted. Ordinary family men who abused their daughters for years without anubody in their environment noticing anything.

12.2SCAVENGERS (90 min)

Director Hiroshi Shinomiya, Japan, 1994
In Manila, over 21,000 illegal squatters live in make-shift shacks surrounding a garbage dump named Smokey Mountain. In this place where death is an everyday occurance, the smiling faces of children can also found. working to support themselves and theirs families.

19.2. HARLEM DIARY (60 min)

Director Jonathan Stack, USA, 1995
The New York quarter of Harlem is not the easiest place for a child to grow up in. Every day the predominantly black inhabitants are confrontated with drugs, unemployment and extreme forms of violance. And yet many of them succeed in offering resistance to these negative influences. In this film we are introduced to nine youngsters who do not reconcile to the downward spiral and who, all in their individual ways, make their contribution to the quality of life in their world.

26.2. PUNAISET ESILIINAT (55 min)

Director Seppo Rustanius

5.3. DIVIDED MEMORIES(120 min)

Director Ofra Bikel, USA, 1995
Is it possible that a person can have a traumatic sexual experience in childhood, lose all memory of it and, years later, recover that memory? Ofra Bikel's prize-winning film looks at the controversial phenomenon of repressed memory through the testimony of children, parents and psychoterapists.

12.3. NÄISSÄ RAAMEISSA (84min)

Director Noora Männistö

19.3.TUOMITTU (45 min)

Director Visa Koiso-Kanttila

26.3.EXPERIMENTUM CRUCIS (52 min)

Directors Taras Popov and Vladimir Tulkin, Kazakhstan, 1995
Shocking and moving account of the daily life inside a prison for boys in Kazakhstan, where the young delinquents tell about their experiences and where there is no more logical relation between crime adn punishment. These boys are caught in a historical process.

2.4. THE SURVIVORS (90min)

Director Andreas Veiel, Germany,1996
High School reunion. graduation class of 1979: we meet again after 16 years. Three of us are missing: they have committed suicide in the intervening years. - Portrait of a whole generation, one that has fallen through the grid of history...

9.4. BOY HERO 001 (55min)

Director Pekka Lehto, KinoFinlandia Oy, 1996
A story about the boy hero Pavlik, who denounced his own father to show his loyalty to the state for concealing grain from the Government and forging peasants identity papers. Pavlik was then immortalised by Stalin as a model to all Soviet children.

16.4. GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE (140min)

Directors Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, USA, 1995
In the Spring of 1989, nighty news acounts filmed in China's Tiananmen Square alternately enthralled and horrified millions of viewers around the globe. Chine students took to the streets demanding democratic reforms, only to have the government respond with deadly force.The film gives voices, for the first time, to those, who directly participated in the protests.

23.4. HILJAISEN HÄDÄN PAIKKA (84min)

Director Pirkko Vallinoja, 1996

30.4. CATWALK (95 min)

Director Robert Leacock, USA, 1995
Celebrating that rare breed of supermodel who has turned being beautiful into art form, Catwalk follows supermodel Christy Turlington on a whirlwild, insider tour of the Spring Fashion collection in Milan, Paris and New York. At the same time that Catwalk anatomized the fashion indusry, capturing the models and designers as they create unforgettable images in the runway, the documentary chronicles the absolute professionalism that goes hand-in-hand with success.