Arto Halonen is a renowned filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter known for tackling socially relevant topics. He has received numerous international awards and accolades for his work.
Halonen was awarded the Finland Prize in 2005, the highest annual cultural prize in Finland, and the City of Helsinki Culture Prize in 2010. He also won the Humanitarian Award of the European Union in 1998 and has received the Finnish National Mental Health Prize and the Civil Action Prize of the Finnish Federation for Social Welfare and Health.
As the founder and first festival director of the Helsinki Documentary Film Festival DocPoint, Halonen oversaw the festival's growth into one of the largest and most prominent documentary film festivals in the Nordic area and globally.
Halonen's fiction feature films include Princess, which became one of the most watched Finnish films of the last decade, and Murderous Trance, a psychological thriller that premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival and has been sold in 70 countries.
His latest fiction feature, After Us, the Flood, had its world premiere at the Warsaw International Film Festival and won the main prize at the Trieste Science + Fiction Film Festival.
Halonen's documentary films, including Shadow of the Holy Book, Pavlovs Dogs, When Heroes Lie, White Rage, Back Towards Light, and Karmapa Two Ways of Divinity, have attracted widespread attention and have received numerous international awards.
