Arto Halonen

Director · Cast · Writer

Born

January 11, 1964 · Joensuu, Finland

Arto Halonen is an internationally award-winning fiction and documentary film director and producer, known for the strong socially-conscious stance he takes towards his subjects. As a tribute to his work, Halonen was awarded the Finlandia Prize in 2005, the nation's highest annual cultural award, given by Finland's Minister of Education and Culture. Halonen was also given the City of Helsinki Culture Prize in 2010, and was the third filmmaker in history to receive it. He won the award soon after the critical and box office success of his first dramatic feature, Princess. The film reached an audience of more than 300 000 viewers in Finnish cinemas and became one of the most financially successful Finnish feature films of the last decade; it also won multiple international awards. Halonen's feature film, the dark comedy A Patriotic Man, premiered in 2014 and so far its distribution rights have been sold to 25 countries. Renowned US critic Harlan Jacobson chose the film for his prestigious Talk Cinema tour of major American cities for private subscribers, and the film was well-received by the US audience and critics. Halonen's documentary films, such as White Rage (2015), Shadow of the Holy Book (2007) and Karmapa - Two Ways of Divinity (1998), have won significant awards all over the world. Shadow of the Holy Book was nominated for the European Film Academy Award for Best Documentary of the year. Halonen won the Humanitarian Award of the European Union in 1998. In addition, he was given the Finnish National Mental Health Prize and the Civil Action Prize of the Finnish Federation for Social Welfare and Health, making him the first person in the cultural field to receive the prize. Halonen is the founder and the first festival director of DocPoint, Helsinki Documentary Film Festival. During Halonen's tenure, DocPoint became the biggest documentary film festival in the Nordic area and one of the top documentary film festivals globally. Halonen's most recent film, Murderous Trance aka The Guardian Angel, is a Finnish-Danish-Croatian collaboration. The psychological thriller, featuring many international actors, is being opened globally in 2018 and 2019.