Biography
Arto Halonen is an internationally award-winning fiction and documentary film director, producer and screenwriter who is known for his socially relevant topics.
As a tribute to his work, Halonen was awarded the Finland Prize in 2005, which is the highest annual cultural prize awarded by the Minister of Education and Culture of Finland. He was awarded the City of Helsinki Culture Prize in 2010 as only the third filmmaker ever to receive it. Halonen won the Humanitarian Award of the European Union in 1998 and has been granted the Finnish National Mental Health Prize and the Civil Action Prize of the Finnish Federation for Social Welfare and Health, as the first to receive it from the cultural sector. Halonen is also the founder and the first festival director of Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint. 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 first fiction feature film for cinematic distribution, Princess, opened in 2010. The film reached an audience of more than 300 000 viewers in Finnish cinemas and became one of the most watched Finnish films of the last decade in cinema distribution, and it also won multiple international awards.
Halonen's third fiction feature, international co-production, psychological thriller Murderous Trance aka The Guardian Angel premiered in 2018 at the Warsaw Film Festival. The films distribution rights have been sold in 70 countries. In January 2020, the film was awarded as Best Feature Film at the Gold Movie Awards in London and Josh Lucas was awarded as Best Actor for his role. Halonen's family feature film Arnold Cautious and The Happiness Stone (2023) is co-written with Jukka Itkonen. The movie has been screened in international competitions at major Children and Young Audience festivals, such as Schlingel CFF Chemnitz, Just Film CFF Tallinn (Black Night FF), Molodist IFF Kyiv, Vienna CFF 2024 and Steiermark CFF Graz 2024 where the movie received an award by the Children's Jury as the Best film of the festival.
Halonen's latest fiction feature, international co-production After Us, the Flood had its world premiere at the Free Spirit competition at Warsaw International Film Festival, in October 2024. In November, After Us, the Flood won the main prize, Silver Méliès, at the Trieste Science + Fiction Film Festival, Italy.
Halonen's documentary films have attracted much public attention and conversation (including the Shadow of the Holy Book, Pavlovs Dogs, When Heroes Lie, White Rage, Back Towards Light and Karmapa Two Ways of Divinity), and the films have received numerous international awards. The Shadow of the Holy Book has been nominated also for the European Film Academys award for the best documentary of the year in 2008. Many of Halonen's films have been selected to multiple A-list festivals, including International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where five of his documentaries have been selected, three of them in the main Feature Length Documentary Competition, making him one of the most screened directors there. In 2008, Halonen received the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festivals Lifetime Achievement Award. The festivals official statement described Halonen as one of the most important documentary filmmakers of his time, saying his work contributes to the development of documentaries on an international scale. Halonen's recent documentary feature Home and Away had its international premiere in March 2024 at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival.
12 wins and 9 nominations
