Torn between obsessive insecurity and proselytizing zeal, between the requirements of Europe and the temptations of Asia, the Russian Empire always had a role in the European equilibrium – but was never emotionally a part of it.
–from Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger
Among the many sub-genres of long-form nonfiction cinema, filmmakers who make works from archival materials often find that the films take on lives of their own. As someone who regularly takes deep dives into the archives for his film work, writer/director, Arthur Franck, says that it can be a kind of “re-witnessing”, something that feels akin to encountering “a ghost story that continues to haunt us”. Arthur, along with producer, Sandra Enkvist, and a small steady team of experts, runs the boutique production company Polygraf, in Helsinki, Finland. Arthur originally founded the company with Oskar Forstén, now the commissioning editor at AVEK – Kopiosto, Finland’s largest funder for film and moving image, ably helmed by the organization’s current director, Ulla Simonen.
In the film, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev’s dancing bushy eyebrows and fluttering small white butterflies are leitmotifs to describe what’s been termed the “butterfly effect”, which describes how small changes can result in unpredictable consequences over a long period of time. The Helsinki Effect (Showtime in Helsinki was the film’s original title) is an amalgam of a lot of small creative decisions that resulted in an enticing, funny, innovative look at a piece of history that most people didn’t pay much attention to even when it was taking place a half century ago. In the case of this film, it’s taken many years of dedication and many essential decisions that went into creating a work as compelling and strong enough to be of interest to the international film community as this one.
The idea of a pan-European security conference was raised by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and brought up again in the mid-1960s, something Brezhnev wanted quite badly. In 1969, the western alliance indicated its readiness to take part in such a gathering provided certain conditions were met, including a discussion of conventional disarmament in Europe and the inclusion of human rights issues. Various obstacles were overcome in the early 1970s, and finally the preparatory talks were launched in November 1972, with Finland serving as host for the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in Finlandia Hall in 1975. A half century on, the Hall has been re-opened, newly refurbished, the very auditorium where the action in the film takes place. The burnt-orange carpet of the mid-70s has been replaced by a beautiful cool “Finnish blue” one, the grand staircase is lit with trippy ultramarine lighting, and the refinished woodwork is polished to a sheen. It’s like entering an elegant fishbowl, a place that begs for pomp and circumstance. The timing of its re-opening served as part of a program for the opening event of Finland’s OSCE Chairpersonship, which Finland takes over once again this year, making The Helsinki Effect’s début all that more auspicious in terms of relevance – and timing.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is a body that takes a comprehensive approach to humanitarian-centered security: politically, militarily, economically, and environmentally. All current 57 participating States enjoy equal status, and decisions are taken on a non-legally binding basis. Cooperation is the key word here. And also: patience. Diplomats and the international diplomatic community are the tortoises to the wild hares of electoral politics.
Based on hundreds of hours of archival footage, The Helsinki Effect also makes use of powerful AI-driven voice simulation software to drive its narrative, in part. In the following conversation, we also talk about what was filmed and recorded around the final part of this international conference in 1975 – the ceremonial signing of the agreement by all member nations, the last of a tri-partite endeavor – and what was left un-filmed and unrecorded, thus leaving only “fragments of audiovisual evidence” for Arthur to play with. We also talk about the mysterious, but essential, diplomatic work that keeps our world somewhat upright. Arthur, Sandra and I convened recently to talk in-depth about the making of the film, its own complex history, and the narrative malleability one can find upon waking up the archives of time and using them for one’s own creative obsessions.
Pamela Cohn (PC): I’d like to start the conversation with one of the featured protagonists in your film, Henry Kissinger. When did it dawn on you that you needed to be in dialogue with Kissinger in the film, Arthur? At the time of the summit, he was serving as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to US President Gerald Ford, serving in the same capacities for Richard Nixon as well, who left the preceding US presidency in disgrace. He becomes your guide and interlocutor through the events depicted in the film.
Arthur Franck (AF): Kissinger was still alive when we started the film. He died very recently, in 2023. My father met him in the early 1990s because my dad was living in the US and had been invited to the RAND think tank. Kissinger was at RAND for one of these meetings that were still grappling with east-west relations. Then I started reading Christopher Hitchens’ writings on Kissinger and his was an aggressively critical voice. Kissinger was a controversial figure, to put it mildly. I’ve seen so many documentaries featuring him, seen interviews, read books on him. He’s a completely fascinating, magnetic presence. He was the first diplomatic superstar that wasn’t a president. He was on magazine covers and many were curious about who he was dating, what parties he attended and all that. He took over every room he was in with his charisma and intelligence.
I knew Kissinger had been in Helsinki in ’75 when I decided to make this film. I read a book called “The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War” by Michael Cotey Morgan. Kissinger is quoted in there talking about the European Security Conference and the international agreement’s détente process. And all Kissinger does is negatively criticize the conference, letting everyone know that he hates it. What was interesting were the conflicting energies of the Soviet side who wanted this agreement so much and Kissinger, the West’s central foreign policy actor present, who thought it was a waste of time. But the US goes along with it in the name of détente. So, you have one side who wants it a lot (the East) and the other who does not (the West), but the side that’s reluctant about the whole thing, the West, wins it, to say it in a blunt way. It did benefit humanity, of course. Anyway, that paradox was interesting to me. As well, Kissinger was really funny and witty in expressing his skepticism and how he couldn’t stand this boring conference. He just didn’t consider it important to the process. All this source material told me to use him in some way and the archived transcripts offered that path.
Kissinger was right, in part, because the footage of the conference is pretty boring and uneventful on the surface. Creating this device of the transcribed phone calls between Leonid Brezhnev and Kissinger was something I thought I’d try last fall and my co-editor Markus Leppälä and I both felt it worked. Validation for this also came from Sandra and our co-producers in Germany. Usually if no one tells me to stop doing something, I’ll plow ahead and, in this case, the advice was to really lean in. Also with this element, I could use my questions to Kissinger and his answers back to fill in some of the blanks that weren’t available in the transcripts or texts in books and speeches. It offered a more graceful way to offer exposition and context. I don’t mind the “voice-of-god” in some documentaries, but I didn’t want to provide that kind of narration for this film.
PC: You’re both now part of the same small production company devoted to nonfiction, with a talented team to shepherd very complex, adventurous projects, both short- and feature-length. Producer / director teams work in myriad ways with one another. As the main producers for this film, I would love for you both to describe how you see the producer role in documentary film.
AF: In this instance, the partnership I have with Sandra was borne out of necessity, more than anything, since she was already on board as a member of the company with a project she had brought with her. Oskar Forstén has been my producer for eighteen years but decided to take the commissioner position at AVEK Audiovisual Centre here in Helsinki when the position opened up, the one job, he said, he would consider taking outside of producing films with us. Oskar was always searching for young producers who already had something going, and that’s not always easy to find – the right human being, the right kind of project, so we wouldn’t have to compromise on either. Sandra brought in the short film Magnifica: Passive Intruder [2024] by Ville Koskinen, which was a great fit for us. So, with Oskar leaving, it was up to Sandra to take a bigger role and buy herself into the company if she chose. And I took on a producing role as well, something I’d never had to do before.
PC: I saw your incredibly wonderful pitch at CPH:FORUM in Copenhagen last year. And now the film is world premiering in that same festival’s international competition this March. That must be very satisfying.
Sandra Enkvist (SE): Really, everything Arthur is describing had all happened only a couple of months before CPH – a new company, a new partner, a really big project. In one year’s time so many things happened in Polygraf. I have so many funny memories of being in Copenhagen with Arthur. It was quite a dynamic start!
AF: In a way, our partnership and this film and the future of our company was really born in Copenhagen. With Sandra on board, we felt empowered, able to drop the feeling we’d had that we didn’t have a project that could belong on an international stage. At the same time, she and I were both slightly overwhelmed because the pitch went so well due to a lot of factors, including the situation in the world right now. There was something in the room there and it’s not something you can quite quantify but it gave us the capacity to really believe in what we were trying to do. We started editing the film the week after we returned from Copenhagen, but we also had so many follow-ups from the Forum, all in hopes that it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors. But ARTE Germany wanted to work with us and came on board, we found co-producers in Germany and Norway and connected with both The Norwegian Film Institute and Nordisk Film & TV Fond. This whole process took half a year, but it was real. We’ve been learning by doing all year long.
SE: Arthur said to me right after CPH that we have to promise that we’ll have fun as well as everything else because we knew it was going to be a really tight year with lots of struggles, including doing new things we’d never done before in running the company and entering into the international field with so little time. That was not the original plan. For me, what was super important to realize was what kinds of projects I wanted to be a part of. Without this experience, I wouldn’t really have understood that what I wanted at this point in my career was that when I bring a project to the table, I must see the international potential. I didn’t really know this until I started working with Arthur on this film. In other words, how big is a director’s vision for themselves and their projects? As a producer, that’s become essential for me.
AF: There’s been a new chance for a small company, and for us as filmmakers, to grow like we’ve had to do without Oskar at the producing helm. He made my life easy for years because he completely freed me up from pursuing this kind of entrepreneurship. With Sandra, I now had to take those follow-up calls and make those decisions and not just be the creator. Even just finding out about the chance to pitch in Copenhagen was not a small thing. It’s also something that just does not happen that many times, to have this huge opportunity to be invited to such an important pitch forum. As Sandra said, it reminded us of where we wanted to be. We’ve both been making films for a long time, but this is really the first time that we’ve really allowed ourselves to think big. There’s a kind of self-hypnosis that sets in: Let’s stay small and we’ll just make what we think is cool, not caring if it gets a lot of attention. That can work for a while – feeling too inhibited or whatever it takes to not expose yourself too much. But if we allow ourselves to think big from the beginning of whatever we’re making, then we might attract interest from the kind of funders and co-producers we were able to with this film.
SE: For me, once I went through this experience at CPH: FORUM, I wanted to be able to repeat that, to have those opportunities, to meet people from around the world who share the same ambitions. I really try to think about a film’s international potential from early development. I have a desire to work with directors who also want to share their films internationally and reach those wider audiences.
PC: This might be a strange segue, but maybe not. We could say that there is a psychological profile of an entire culture, in some respects, especially in a small, mono-cultural place like Finland. Thus far, in all your feature work, Arthur, there is the looming presence of President Urho Kekkonen, the leader of Finland from 1956 to 1982, an incredible 26-year reign. Can you describe what his legacy means for people of your generation and for the country as a whole? Could it be that this creative growth you’re both speaking of is somehow surpassing limitations that you took for granted? In other words, this bid to “stay small” was something ingrained, perhaps. There’s this notion of “Finlandization”, referring to the influence of the Soviet Union on Finland’s policies during the Cold War, and maybe that took its toll too, psychologically?
AF: There’s a reason why there are so many books on Kekkonen but it’s hard to come up with a simple answer to these concepts you’re speaking about. It’s true that he’s been a character in all three of my feature films, a proxy for some weird, lurking presence in the background and that’s because it’s easy to portray him that way. Regarding Kekkonen, one can look at Finland in the Cold War era in different ways, always with a critical eye. Growing up, he was “the man”, a sort of hero who got us through this thing, a cool guy. He was funny – at least he was in Finnish – and very charismatic. He got shit done and kept the Russians in check. That’s the mythos around him.
As far as Finlandization, it is a derogatory term in the sense that whoever said it first, a German, I think, it meant that they didn’t want “to become like them”, meaning the Finns – implying that Finns were being unduly influenced by the Soviet Union. If a smaller country lives under the influence of a much larger neighboring nation, what kind of negative effect does it have on the smaller country’s behavior? People in that country start to act, by default, in a kind of self-censorship mode in their political behavior or the internal political climate, so as to be in line with the bigger nation’s wishes. People here were offended by that term. The Soviets were offended by it too. But it also went hand in hand with how we felt we could cope with the situation of the 60s era cold war. It’s complicated. I remember, at any rate, that Kekkonen had to constantly deny this was happening here. How all this affects Finland today is hard to say. Of course, everything in the past has its effects in what happens today. As a nation, we did finally join NATO in 2023. That would have felt completely impossible during Kekkonen’s era. For me, all this offers a lot of good material to make stories. As well, there aren’t that many European democratic countries that had the same leader for that long so maybe that’s a blemish on our reputation. In ’73, he continued in office without an election being held and that doesn’t really jell with how we want to see ourselves as a democratic example up in the North, right next to the Soviet Union.
PC: Let’s talk about the technical, as well as the ethical, challenges around the decision to use AI to generate facsimiles of voices in the film. Without getting too wonky about it, can you describe that process and the decisions to use English as the lingua franca for everyone, including those individuals, like Leonid Brezhnev, who did not speak in English? I’m not implying that it’s controversial, as such, but it is a dramaturgical tool that I would imagine took a lot of finessing. There’s no trickery here; it’s stated in the film quite clearly that that’s what’s happening.
AF: The use of that tool was already in place when Sandra came on board the project.
SE: That’s right. It was included as part of our public pitch.
AF: Yes, the psychological arguments or ethical questions around the AI technology we might have had were already vetted when I was still working with Oskar on this.
SE: I didn’t think it would have been un-cool in any way if I had been part of those initial discussions. It’s based on the transcripts. I saw it as an interesting way to include those texts in the film for more dynamic storytelling. It would have been a different scenario if it had been based on something fictional. There are a few lines when Arthur is speaking in his dialogues with Kissinger that are made up, but as we’ve discussed, that was to help with context. It’s an artistic choice and I think that’s clear.
AF: Anything of substance in the film is based on written texts or something that had been said in recordings in the archive. Any out-of-the-box element, whether it’s image, sound, text, etc., is as subjective as anything anyway, including what appears to be straightforward talking head footage in documentary filmmaking, especially with historical subjects. There’s always some kind of moral justification for using certain storytelling tools. In watching other people’s films, I’m quite liberal in what I think should be “allowed”. The most important questions are: Does it work? And does it make it interesting? It’s nothing to do with morals. It’s not that different than using a voice actor, for instance, or a film that simulates old, cracked recordings on analogue. Or Super-8 recreations or other old analogue formats that make the footage look and sound a certain way.
When I made the trailer for the CPH pitch, it started by saying that this is not Henry Kissinger’s voice, front and center. The pushback was around the reveal actually, since I had some colleagues who told me they wanted to be fooled into thinking that it was his voice and not to ruin the illusion. But that choice really liberated us into going with it. There is already quite a bit of humor in the transcript texts and so that also liberated me to develop my own character in the film. The generative voice cloning software is very powerful, so it wasn’t the idea of pushing. It involved much holding back, in fact. We go back to creative choice and the fact that we are at peace as a team around the ethics of this. I also always ask people I love and respect to watch cuts and act as my bullshit detectors.
SE: I remember that the AI was a component that really fascinated a lot of people we spoke to. It was a very positive and key topic of discussions we had with potential partners.
AF: Everything being in English has turned out to be a bit stickier. That’s a line, for instance, our German broadcasters challenged, about having people “speaking” English in the film when they didn’t, in real life. The transcripts from the US State Department are only in English. If I would have to re-translate them into Russian, that would have added only another layer of distortion, right? In some way, for me, it’s truer to have them speaking the language that’s in the transcripts we use. The German version we’ll do is still a point of discussion. For example, in the film, there’s a transcription used from the Politburo, which is in Russian, where leaders are speaking to one another about the “problem” of writer and dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and his fate. The notes are taken by KGB minions that were smuggled out of Russia by Vladimir Bukovsky, which he collected on a site I found on The Wayback Machine with all the notes he took out of Russia, all in translation. There was a link there to follow to get to the original versions, but that link was broken.
In documentary, as in anything, you have to work with limitations like this and use the precious time you have to keep going. I can understand the argument that that text should be in Russian and, for me, it’s representative of how murky things can get in order to do the right thing. Everybody has different lines around all of that. It’s a constant evolution.
PC: The film is coming out in the 50th anniversary year of the OSCE and Finland, once again, inhabits the Chairpersonship of the organization, led by Elina Valtonen, Minister for Foreign Affairs. How does this resonate with what became known as the Helsinki Effect, a concept around the argument that human rights norms mattered more, or were just as vital, as geopolitical power or economics in attempting to end the Cold War? As we know, there’s now a very hot war right next door again.
AF: When I started working on this, this anniversary was not on my radar, necessarily. At the time, 2025 felt like a million years away. However, I did see potential in the fact of releasing it exactly 50 years after the event documented. There are so many factors for a launch of a film to go wrong or miss the mark somehow. An anniversary like this is as good a reason as any to aim for a deadline and the CPH pitch represented those last moments to get additional funding on board since we had a year at that point. YLE had also expressed a desire for the film to release within a certain window around the anniversary, including the domestic cinema release.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs opportunity created synergies with our film and with the OSCE committee that runs the Chairpersonship of this anniversary year, but that happened pretty late in the game. It gave us an interesting new avenue to create context for the film and its future, including a probable screening in Finlandia Hall this summer on the anniversary of the signing of the agreement.
But for the diplomatic community here, and hopefully abroad, the film’s significance lies in the fact that somebody is talking about diplomacy and détente. It’s gratifying to be linked to such dedicated people who are still doing the work that we’re portraying in the film. The current invasion of Ukraine had not started when I began the film. The tragedy of the war, as you said, right next door, created a resonance for the film that wasn’t there originally.
SE: I always find it interesting that a film and the topics it’s presenting can become so relevant in such profound and unexpected ways.
AF: I do think it will affect how the film might be received, because from today’s perspective, the Helsinki process, with all its tedium and boredom and chaos, is impacting our world now in a positive way. Grant Keir, who helped us prep for our big pitch said that he felt like we were witnessing the death of diplomacy. And that made me realize that this film could be one about hope. That kind of framing really stuck with us; we found it incredibly inspiring that this ends up being a film about hope. I don’t consider myself a very emotional filmmaker. I gravitate towards the weird and the absurd so I can protect myself and my feelings.
SE: But then it did become emotional and hopeful.
AF: Exactly. You feel this also in the work of Uno Helmersson and Patrik Andrén, our amazing composers, in the way they interpreted a score that was much more emotional and aspirational than I had originally conceived it with my reference music. My own habits got in the way of expanding the potential scope, so I had to embrace it. It becomes, then, a film that I don’t think I would have been able to make with different collaborators than the ones I ended up with.
As far as the diplomatic community, the dedication to the slow, hard work – that might sometimes all be in vain – is what we need right now more than ever. We can maybe empower those soldiers in those back rooms to keep doing that kind of work and we wanted the film to provide a deeper understanding of what diplomacy work consists of. It is in that very slow pro-peace diplomatic process where we can feel hopeful. I don’t think anyone who works in our milieu believes that we can make films that change the world anymore, if they ever did. It’s not like a national leader or someone in a position of power, someone who can make decisions that impact many lives will see this film and be persuaded to do something different.
What there is, though, is an opportunity for the general audience to learn that these processes are ongoing, to learn that this is really the work that changes things. It’s not one big speech delivered somewhere or one powerful leader doing some big gesture to advance his or her career. The diplomatic community consists of lots of people we don’t ever see or hear about, who work within these structures and frameworks every single day. They’re the real heroes and they don’t get a lot of thanks for it. They deserve their moment in the sun.
The Helsinki Effect directed by Arthur Franck, produced by Arthur Franck and Sandra Enkvist (Finland 2025) will celebrate it’s World Premiere in March 25 at CPH:DOX.
More information are here available. Congratulations to the film team!
Link to the company’s webpage: https://polygraf.fi/
Pamela Cohn is a Helsinki-based critic, writer, film & video curator, story structure consultant, and festival moderator. She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image.
