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Finland taps Indian talent and stories for documentaries
By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service

Margao (Goa), May 3 (IANS) Finland, known as the "heaven for documentaries" is tapping talent and stories from India, "the land of a million stories".

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Finland's public broadcaster YLE TV 2 commissioning editor Iikka Vehkalahti has spent a fairly long stint in Goa this tourist season. 

But unlike other Finns who come to the west coast of India on vacations, his unusual job has been to pick up images and stories that could be shown back home in his sparsely populated Nordic nation.

"This project is shaping up quite well," said Vehkalahti in an interview with IANS. "During the last one-and-a-half years, we have met nearly 100 filmmakers from across India in face-to-face discussions, in Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi."

Finland, a country of just 5.2 million people but with a rich tradition of documentary film making, is keen to show another face of India to its audience.

"We have selected 14 proposals for our 'Changing India' series, which is made up of 52-minute documentary films. We have quite a nice collection of different genres and approaches reflecting diverse places of the country. Most filmmakers are quite well known, but some are young and unknown," he added.

What kind of films is he looking at?

Explains Vehkalahti: "Challenging, risky, provocative, fresh stories, those taking place in front of the camera and now. Stories with a strong point of view of the director, but not giving statements. Stories raising questions instead of giving answers."

Vehkalahti is looking for documentary filmmakers in this part of the world who are feeling lonely.

They lack substantial support of high-quality producers, and are bereft of a "real, living dialogue with high-quality professionals," he said. This is true in many countries outside the affluent northern Europe and the U.S., he added.

"I would say there is no use producing bad, surface quality, boring documentaries. If you want to change the world or affect the way people think, you should do films that are so well drafted and so well thought that people would love to see them," he said.

Says Vehkalahti: "During the last two years, I have pre-bought or bought eight or nine documentary films from India. Anand Patwardhan's 'War and Peace', Anjali Monterio and Jayshankar's 'Naata' (about communal amity in a Mumbai squalid slum), Rahul Roy's City Beautiful, Rakesh Sharma's work ... and so on."

He said although India was a huge country with a strong tradition of filmmaking, Indian documentaries were too often prisoners of the past. "They are very often strongly issue-based. Information is very heavy. It's a little bit like preaching or giving-out statements."

Vehkalahti studied theatre before becoming a freelance journalist on art, politics and social activism, and finally switched to documentaries.

Incidentally, Vehkalahti's first long documentary - on Baba Amte - was made in India. After producing and directing documentary films for 10 years, he was asked to be a commissioning editor in YLE.