Heikki Färm

Movies

Comeback
Director of Photography
No Love Lost shot to global fame like a shooting star and made millionaires out of its members. Guitarist Tony drank his millions and hasn't been able to play a chord in years. The guitars have been pawned and no new songs are being written. A message about singer-songwriter Katarina reaches Tony. The singer, who has been sober for a long time, has relapsed into drugs with fatal consequences. Katarina's teenage daughter Ellie, who has been placed in a family home, contacts Tony to find out about her family background. In the process, she reveals a secret to Tony that could enable No Love Lost to make a comeback and save Tony's finances. Tony decides to go to the funeral and get to know his daughter enough to get a DNA sample from her to confirm paternity - and gain access to Katarina's inheritance.
70 Is Just a Number
Director of Photography
Seija Kuula is a superstar singer and an ageless goddess with a career spanning decades and decades. Problems start to arise when Seija falls in love with a younger guy and everybody around her seem to suffer from a bad case of baby fever. Seija orchestrates a masterplan to make everyone happy only to realize that one can not play with love. 70 Is Just a Number is a warm and humorous coming-of-age story – at 70.
A People’s Radio – Ballads from a Wooded Country
Director of Photography
A People’s Radio – Ballads from a Wooded Country is a carnivalesque portrayal of the Finnish landscape of the soul and abode. The short film is based on the iconic YLE programme “People’s Radio”, and its visual material has been created by the road movie method of driving across summery Finland. The film paints a panorama of what Finland looks like today. Its narration progresses through humour into civic anarchy, ultimately also towards the longing for human connection.
The Bouncer
Director of Photography
A night club bouncer gets disgusted of all the violence and repression of the weak he is seeing. He has to act to protect the victims.
Aalto
Director of Photography
This captivating exploration of Alvar Aalto, the defining figure in Scandic design and one of Europe's greatest modern architects, focuses on his remarkable and loving partnership with wife, Aino. Theirs was a profoundly humanist vision that put people at the centre of design, and ranged from work in furniture design through to huge architectural projects. They mixed with, and influenced, major figures of modernist art and design including Le Corbusier, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Come on a cinematic tour of their iconic buildings all over the world, from a library in Russia, a student dormitory at MIT, an art collector's private house near Paris, to a pavilion in Venice. Narrated by experts in the field and featuring never before seen archive footage, Aalto tells the love story of an extraordinary couple with a great passion for human scale architecture.
The Longest Day
Director of Photography
This melancholy, dryly comedic Finnish-language film is the fourth of a five-part series on minority languages in Sweden.
Baby Jane
Director of Photography
Jane, a small-town girl, has moved to Helsinki and the world is finally open for her. Passionate and excited, she seeks adventure, all the things she has yearned for so long. Jane gravitates to a gay bar at night, staggers in her nervous state of mind, and suddenly there, right next to her, Jane finds her savior: Piki, the most dashing butch in town. Piki is perfect. Jane is hypnotized by Piki's dark-toned voice. Piki offers her an entire new universe, and even more - dreams.
Void
Director of Photography
Eero’s career as an author is spiraling down: he just can’t get started with his new novel. The ambitious actor Pihla is about to get her international break. Neither of them is willing to sacrifice their career even though their relationship is doing worse than ever. Void is a comedy-drama about the price of success and the agony of failure, and about situations where your partner just doesn’t get it.
Laugh or Die
Director of Photography
Parikka, the actor once called the Funniest Man in Finland, and his troupe are about to be executed for the atrocities committed during the Civil War in Finland. Jaeger Lieutenant Nyborg, an admirer of Parikka, suspects a definite miscarriage of justice. He wants to save the actors. The forthcoming visit of the German General von der Goltz to the prison island provides him with a suitable opportunity. Nyborg suggests that the actors prepare a comical performance for the visitor and not be shot. Instead, they will be given a new trial. Preparing a comedy in the horrible circumstances, in the midst of hunger and death, seems quite an overwhelming task. Only a handful of real actors are still alive, the rest of the troupe consists of stagehands. Parikka has to use all his inventive skills to be able to produce something funny.
Entrepreneur
Director of Photography
Entrepreneur is a universal nature documentary about Finnish entrepreneurs. This warm and carnevalistic film portrays humans in the middle of ordinary everyday survival. The main protagonists come from two totally different kinds of landscapes, from two diffent time zones. There is a scenery of contemporary modern society and just a few hundred kilometres away we find a rural and nostalgic universe with forgotten people and land.Our first protagonists are Fellini-like family, going from village to another, trying to sell meat from a small meat truck and also run a tiny funfair business. The father, the mother and their four children are working together and trusting only in themselves, not in the help of society. While countryside family is counting coins, the other pair of entrepreneurs, the two well-educated women from the capital area, have invented a vegetable protein product called Pulled Oat, and have become millionaires. But have they also made a world a little bit better?
Kaisa's Enchanted Forest
Director of Photography
Crottet came to Suonikylä in Petsamo for the first time already before the World Wars, and was enchanted by the self-regulatory community he met there. Gauriloff skilfully combines documentary material and the most dreamlike layers of the human mind, letting the harmony of the inner voices crash into the chaotic noise of the surrounding world.
Glass Ceiling
Director of Photography
Sari works in middle management for a multinational company, and a promotion is within her grasp. She just has to finish her last presentation, break the glass ceiling and make it to the conference room in time.
Distractions
Director of Photography
Distracted by life, Mr. Makkonen misses his engagement party by decades. From the cradle to the grave, life keeps interrupting, not only him, but a tired mother, a doomed superhero and the rest of the comrades in this uncontrollable world. Mixing comedy and fantasy with dark stories, Distractions will deliver the laughs with strings attached.
The Two and Only
Director of Photography
Hanna is a 30 something single woman from Helsinki. She has a good job and great friends and has almost given up on finding the Mr. Right. One night, Hanna meets Markus, a dark stranger who sweeps her off her feet.
Police Investigates
Cinematography
A short film directed by Aleksi Salmenperä.
Säilöttyjä unelmia
Director of Photography
A simple can of ravioli propels this spectacular 30,000-kilometre, eight-country journey through all phases of food production and the far flung sources of international ingredients. A dream-like voyage with glimpses of disconcerting realities, the story begins with a single mother toiling in one of the biggest open pit mines in Brazil and ends on the shelf of a grocery store in Finland. Along the way, the workers whose calloused hands mine, raise and harvest each ingredient reveal their dreams and hopes, like the Danish pig farmer who loves his sows but longs for a girlfriend, and the Portuguese tomato picker who wants to stay healthy long enough to pay her daughters way through university. Sumptuous photography and impressive sound design make an eloquent statement about our modern, globalized world, making us aware of the hundreds of invisible people who prepare the food we eat every day. -Gisèle Gordon (HotDocs.ca)
Into Eternity: A Film for the Future
Director of Photography
Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and to societal changes. In Finland the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels - that must last 100,000 years as this is how long the waste remains hazardous.
Gimme Some Respect
Director of Photography
Young Siiri is starting her life on her own. She wants to be independent and live a normal life, although she is mentally handicapped. She begins to make true of her dreams, where she has a real working place and she hopes to find also a husband.
Steam of Life
Director of Photography
Finnish men in sauna, speaking straight from the heart.
Auf wiedersehen Finnland
Director of Photography
Contract
Director
Documentary about the nurses' strike in Finland on autumn 2007.
Unna and Nuuk
Director of Photography
11-year-old Unna travels in time to the stone age with the help of a magic drum.
My Friend Henry
Director of Photography
When 12-year-old Elsi Björkman and her mother Paula return from a week's holiday abroad, Elsi immediately notices that someone has been in her room. She tells her mother about it, but she does not believe her. At the local supermarket Elsi meets Henry, who seems to spend his time returning shopping trolleys. Elsi does not know anything about the boy, who has an irritating habit of appearing from out of nowhere, only to disappear again, as if into thin air. Nevertheless, the children become friends.
Bad Luck Love
Director of Photography
A shocking crime forces a man to re-evaluate his life, only to find that going straight is more complicated than he imagined. Ali is a low-level criminal who spends much of his spare time working out at a gym with his brother Pulu. Ali spends most of his day stoned on marijuana, while Pulu is known to drink cleaning products when he's run out of booze. Ali has fallen in love with Inka, a bright woman with a mind of her own, and her independent nature occasionally throws him into a fit of jealousy.
The Geography of Fear
Director of Photography
When her sister is mugged and raped, Oili, a young female forensic dentist, meets a group of abused women who have taken matters to their own hands to make the living in fear and just letting it happen stop.
State of Dogs
Director of Photography
In Ulan Bator, Mongolia, the cur Baatar is shot by a hunter hired by the authorities to get rid off the dogs in the city...
The Collector
Director of Photography
Eevi's life isn't going the way she would want it to, so she runs away, leaving destruction in her wake. No one will ever say no to her again.
Sin
Director of Photography
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.
Hunger
Director of Photography
War and famine drive the inhabitants of the snowy forest into desperate and macabre deeds.