The 9th DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival closed on Sunday, its films and events drawing over 27,000 festival-goers, of which 22,000 in the cinemas alone. The side event DocPoint Tallinn which was organized for the first time, was also a success with its 2100 visitors. What attracted the visitors of DocPoint Helsinki most were the premier screenings of Finnish documentary films.

The 9th DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival will take over the cinemas of Helsinki on the 26th–31st of January. This year DocPoint celebrates the pioneers of Finnish documentary film: producers Aho & Soldan. Year 2010 marks the 85th anniversary of the respectable company. In honouring the occasion, the festival will feature a wide Aho & Soldan retrospective, compiled in association with the National Audiovisual Archive. In the opening ceremony documentary film director Kiti Luostarinen will receive the Aho & Soldan Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is worth 5,000€, and is sponsored by the Finnish Broadcasting Company.

DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival is proud to present documentarist Kiti Luostarinen with the Aho & Soldan Lifetime Achievement Award for her long, successful career. The festival will honour the awardee by screening a selected retrospective of her work. DocPoint will be held on the 26th –31st January 2010, and the award will be handed to Luostarinen during the opening ceremony at the Bio Rex cinema on Tuesday, the 26th of January at 6:30 pm.

The DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival programme includes many films that deliberately use provocation to expose something that would otherwise remain hidden. The festival programme also features films dealing with immigration and cultural borders, as well as the Winners & Bestsellers series comprising the most successful documentaries of the festival circuit. DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival will take place on the 26th –31st of January 2010.

The Finnish documentary films for the 2010 DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival have been selected. The Jury selected 15 films for the New Finnish Documentary Films programme and 9 films for the Finnish Film Schools programme. In addition, one Finnish film will be included in the Special Screenings and one in the Arrivals programme.

Acknowledged filmmakers, French Nicolas Philibert and Polish Marcel Lozinski, will be attending DocPoint Festival as honoured guests. The 9th DocPoint – Helsinki Documentary Film Festival takes place on the 26th–31st of January 2010.

The festival programme will include a comprehensive retrospective of Lozinski’s work. Academy Award nominated Marcel Lozinski has been a productive filmmaker since 1972. In his documentaries Lozinski potrays people living under socialism and questioned the prevailing social conditions. He is a lecturer at Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing and has influenced a whole new generation of Polish filmmakers.
 

DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival will be held for the first time in Tallinn on January 29th-31st 2010.

- The initiative to start DocPoint in Tallinn came from our Estonian colleagues. People are getting more interested in documentaries in Estonia, but they haven't had a festival focused only on documentary film. Estonian and Finnish cultures are so similar that starting the cooperation felt natural, says Artistic Director of DocPoint Festival Erkko Lyytinen.