Spring 2024

Days of Wonder (working title) is in production! The documentary film, my first feature one, will be ready in spring 2025. Only in december 2023, after working on the film for almost two years, did we secure Finnish financing for the film and that felt just awesome of course. So grateful to everyone who is making this possible.

Playing With the Lake has premiered in Nordic Culture Point gallery B28 in Suomenlinna, Helsinki. It is a short documentary film directed by me, about sound artist Petri Kuljuntausta and his art work in Kilpisjärvi and part of Danish Between Music’s unique project ”Sound’s Hidden Journey Under Nordic Waters”.

Read more at:

August 2023

Finnish Film Foundation has chosen ”Days of Wonder” (earlier title ”Dear Markku”) as Finland’s wildcard for pitching forum Nordisk Panorama Forum! I am honored and grateful for this opportunity. We will travel with producer Sonja Lindén to Malmö in September to pitch our project, which is now in late development phase. Very excited about this! Check out the chosen projects from the link down below:

https://nordiskpanorama.com/en/industry/forum/forum-projects/

Spring 2023

Participating in Nordisk Panorama’s workshop DocForward with my film project ”Days of Wonder” (earlier ”Dear Markku”). My first feature length documentary. The film tells the story of my uncle, artist and composer Markku Pennanen’s very special life, and about our relationship. This is a film that chose me. In December 2021 I realised I need to put all my other projects, mostly fictive, aside and start working on ”Days of Wonder”. I had to listen to its call. The film is planned to be finished by the end of 2024. Right now we are in late development phase and hoping to move to production in fall 2023. The film is being produced by Sonja Lindén and her production company Avanton Productions. Cinematographer Ville Tanttu has been filming it from the beginning. I have a great team with wonderful, super talented people! So far, in writing and development phase, we have been supported by Finnish Film Foundation, AVEK and Konstsamfundet. I also got a 2 month grant from Espoo city to work on the film and now I have a 6 month grant from The Finnish Cultural Foundation. We participated in the DocCelerator workshop earlier, in fall 2022. Grateful for all the support I have got along the journey and looking forward to sharing this amazing story with the audience.

September 2021

I have been developing my tv-series idea in the Serieverkstaden workshop at YLE now for almost a year. The result is a complete pilot episode and step outlines for episodes 2-4. It´s been an interesting process and again confirmed my believe that I personally gain from a frame and deadlines during my writing process. The absolutely best thing has been having a mentor, Kirsi Porkka. She guided me in a wise way. And of course also getting feedback from my fellow writers (we were 5 projects in this workshop) and getting to know them! We met IRL the first time last week and they all seemed like old friends even though I met them for the first time – virtually we have been discussing throughout the year. Thank you Svenska Yle for this opportunity. The year culminated in a pitch workshop with pitchguru and -coach, producer Helene Granqvist from Sweden. I don´t know how it is possible that I have managed to avoid pitching in my career for this long but Helene really opened up my eyes to this tool, which I call it. A tool to communicate your idea to others and, let´s face it, sell the concept, BUT also the pitch process as a tool for oneself, for one´s scriptwriting. I had to find the core in my story and that was really helpful for the whole writing process. Got some new ideas. Helene is simply great! On friday 27th of August we pitched our series internally for Yle and yesterday I handed in the script and the step outlines. Now I will be taking a pause from the series for a while and hope to be able to continue writing the scripts for the episodes 2-4 in the future and try out the new ideas that came through the pitch workshop. Further good news: I got a ”corona grant” from Arts Promotion Centre Finland and will be able to continue writing my debut feature film Sanat (The Words) for three months. That means my autumn is saved and I am so relieved. Very happy to pick up my script again after a long pause. So now I am going to dive back into the 30´s and 40´s in Finland´s history with my main characters Astrid and Maija.

October 2020

Happy to announce that my tv-series project has been chosen to the tv-series workshop ”Serieverkstaden” at Svenska Yle, which is the Swedish-speaking department of the Finnish broadcasting company. This is a great workshop supported by Svenska Kulturfonden and the goal is to develope high quality tv-series. All the writers participating are professionals but will through this workshop get a chance to deepen their skills in screenwriting especially for tv-series. My project is one out of five. It is a miniseries set in Helsinki and Lofoten, Norway. I have been dreaming of writing something for the screen set in Lofoten, where I studied film back in the times. I have now started the writing process and the results will be presented in autumn 2021. Looking forward to this journey.

August 2020

The short film that took 7 years to complete! My new short film ”Födelsedagen” (”The Birthday”) is now available at Yle Areena – although unfortunately only inside Finnish borders – until 2027 so there is plenty of time to see it. The film is based on material shot already in 2013. During the pandemic in spring 2020 the atmosphere reminded me of this material and I opened up the old project which in its time had resulted in a demo. I started editing the film and made the sound design. Also shot some complementary scenes and in August the film was released. Here is an article from the time of the release:

https://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2020/08/01/coronakrisen-gav-upphov-till-kortfilm-regissoren-karin-pennanen-skildrar-ensamhet