Silent Legacy (2025). Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, Finland

The movie Silent Legacy is a personal and intimate documentary about the life of dancer and choreographer Sibiry Konaté, based in Finland. Focusing on everyday life of Sibiry, the movie simultaneously presents intersections of identity, migration, dancing professionality, parenting, loneliness and friendship.

Most importantly, it invites us into the transnational life of Sibiry and unfolds tensions related to remittances – transfer of money or goods – back to Burkina Faso. Hence, the movie navigates on personal but also societal levels, revealing the silent legacy of monetary burdens connecting African diaspora members in Europe.

In the words of Sibiry: “It is a shadow of colonialism”. When you migrate to Europe, your position changes and what people see in you is money. This entails that you are expected to bring back money when you go to Western countries. As Sibiry notes: “Everybody relies on you so it’s a heavy burden”.

Behind the underlying burden of coloniality, the movie is visually beautiful, incorporating scenes from Tiene, Sibiry’s village in Burkina Faso. We see children dancing and playing, we hear the sounds of animals and can sense the dust in the sand.

These scenes are interwoven with Sibiry dancing in various contexts—against the white snow representing Finland, in an elevator, and in a white suit while spreading money—insightfully and sensitively illustrating how he navigates different spaces and positions in his transnational life.

Lost between two continents?

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

Having lived in Finland for a long time, the sense of belonging to his village in Burkina Faso has changed. It becomes clear that the Sibiry who left Tiene is no longer welcome as the boy he once was, and that he is not able to go back living in Tiene as the Sibiry he was before moving to the West. Now, he is what he himself refers to as “a god from the land of white people”, everybody wants something from him.

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

This movie contributes to unfolding various complexities in life, as Sibiry is partly an African decent migrant in Finland, struggling in a system with structural racism and partly a privileged European in the eyes of the Tienes relatives and friends. As he states:

“You’re lost between two countries, two continents”

In order to somewhat fulfill the request from friends and family, and perhaps also still the flow of requests of money, Sibiry plans to ship a van from Finland to Burkina Faso. In the burden of doing correctly, he ponders if sending a van can be perceived as showing off – or if the villagers will think the van is not good enough. We see how he negotiates on renovations of the van in Finland, packs the van full with necessities and then ships it to the African continent.

“This bus could bring big changes to Tiene”

Eventually the van does not make it to Sibirys’s village as due to various struggles and setbacks. In the movie, these moments and struggles are brilliantly filmed through the scene of the van, in a dark background, without its engine. Symbolically, the black hole where the engine once sat resonates with the feeling Sibiry might have; this is the thank you get for saving money to buy a van and shipping it to Burkina Faso – getting betrayed.

African remittance legacy

Situating the movie and Sibiry’s experiences in a larger perspective, Sibiry is part of the African diaspora in the Nordic countries. As noted by the United Nations, the amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

Remittances from African diaspora members have a great impact on African economy, from macro structures such as larger companies to microstructures of households and neighborhoods. However, it appears that the report does not address the negative sides of remittances, the dark sides of monetary bounds that are well documented in the movie.

According to recent research, remittances also appear to increase conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at individual experiences of remittance senders, research highlights socio-cultural norms, such as ubuntu, creating tensions and pressure among migrants to send money “back home”, while simultaneously settling in the host country.

The amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

In the movie, we see Sibiry working at Posti and as a cleaner, picturing the precarious situation when it comes to employment for migrants of African descent in Finland. Due to structural challenges in the Finnish job market, such as employment and recruitment discrimination or unnecessary high language requirements, working in precarious positions at low paid jobs is something many migrants end up doing.

Personally, I feel this is such a waste of Sibiry’s dancing talent and feel sad for living in a society not appreciating the dancing expertise Sibiry brings to Finland. Ten years ago, I took part in Sibiry’s afro dance classes and recalled thinking that he should be teaching experts. And so he has been, but still, I cannot but feel frustration against attitudes in the job market in Finland.

“I came here to dance”

“For me dancing is freedom”

From my perspective, it feels unreasonable and unequal that in addition to striving to get along economically and settle in a new host country, one would need to send remittances “back home”. These are exactly the global inequalities Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas with their documentary movies want to illustrate.

The white gaze

This is not the first documentary movie made by Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas. Previously, the couple has been internationally recognized and awarded for their documentary movie Colombia in My Arms. In a documentary series about creative couples at the streaming site Yle Areena, we can follow their journey highlighting global inequalities and unfolding colonial legacies.

In recent years, the lens has also turned towards themselves, raising a discussion about representation and them as white from the Global North making movies about the Global South. We hear them pondering about whether it actually matters if they are white, making a movie in Africa or if it is more important to highlight inequalities than to critically scrutinize them being Europeans and racially white.  

I would suggest that both matters, and that it definitively matters if you are racially white when making movies about colonial legacies. It matters what information, what spaces, what standpoints and what resources you might access. Likewise, it matters that I have a white gaze when writing this review, it positions me differently than if it had been written by an African decent researcher. Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

The film demonstrates considerable sensitivity, and Kivistö and Rastas’ personal experiences of living and spending significant time in the Global South inform their understanding of global inequalities. However, recognizing how being white matters would allow the viewers to feel – for coming movies- that this is an ethically sound movie, where white privileges are made conscious – and perhaps contested.

Towards the end, I want to thank both Sibiry and the documentary makers for this important movie, highlighting intersections of transnational life. Openly sharing personal relations, joys and disappointments for a large public requires strength and courage, thank you for this Sibiry. I really wish this documentary movie would be viewed by politicians, researchers and students and I wish Sibiry, that you will be able to dance, freely.

Liselott Sundbäck is a postdoctoral researcher in social policy at Åbo Akademi University.

Silent Legacy (Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, 2025) is screened at DocPoint-festival 3.–8.2.2026.
Check the screening programme for showtimes.

Read all Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in english here.

All Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in Finnish here.

Article image: Silent Legacy (2025) / DocPoint

Julkaisu DocPoint 2026: “For me, dancing is freedom” ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

Am I calling you at a bad time? (2024). Director: Martta Tuomaala, Finland
All the Light That Remains (2025). Diector: Moona Pennanen, Finland
Spirits / Vuoiŋŋat (2025). Directors: Marja Viitahuhta, Ánnámáret, Turkka Inkilä, Ilkka Heinonen, Finland

DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival turns twenty-five this year, and the anniversary edition lands in Helsinki from 3rd to 8^th of February 2026. Across more than a hundred films, the program combines Finnish premieres from the international selection with domestic films, organized across international, national, and short film competitions.

Out of this year’s submissions, I had the chance to review three significant but very different works, each circling questions of voice, history, and what the camera can and cannot responsibly claim. Taken together, they make a strong case for catching the festival beyond the headline picks. Enough of the setting, now for the calls, the ruins, and the ghosts.

Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025)

Image: Still from Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025) /DocPoint

I first saw Martta Tuomaala’s work last year in a Helsinki gallery, in a tiny dark room that smelled faintly like the offices the unnamed narrator remembers from the 90s. Later, over coffee, a friend asked what it was about. I said it was about a voice learning how to behave. That reductive description feels more accurate after re-watching the work.

Am I calling you at a bad time? [En kai huonoon aikaan soittele?] is a creative documentary that follows a brief stretch of an unnamed narrator’s early working life, an unlikely coming of age story where adulthood arrives with a headset. Our accidental protagonist begins as a telemarketer at the age of 15, then moves through phone sex work, telephone surveys, and ends up in sales.

Though the roles change, “the phone” stubbornly stays put in her story. In terms of form, the work is not a documentary in the strict sense so much as a performed non-fiction or a stylized staging of reality, but let us keep the familiar term, documentary, in this text.

The weight of the work is mainly carried by a playful voice actor, who also happens to be the director and writer, and who wrestles with the Finnish language itself, stretching its rhythms and intonations until it becomes spirited rather than flat. The frisky voice-over often comes to the work’s rescue, as the piece relies heavily on archival images and amateur footage that can at times feel irrelevant or distracting.

The consistent color grading and the decision to keep the narrator faceless sit comfortably with the narrative and with the lived experience of the narrator, let us call her X. We are deliberately kept at a certain distance from X, as the work feels autobiographical without ever becoming self-examining or confessional. Still, its most affecting moments arrive when the work turns inward, such as when X reflects on the effects of her job on her psyche and admits that working as a phone sex operator made her suspicious of her male friends, wondering whether they belonged to the same group of creeps.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

The work is at its most pointed when it turns to everyday gender dynamics. This comes through when X recalls being asked to soften (feminize) her deep voice to increase sales, being told off in a job interview for not wearing make-up or dressing like the other women in the office, or when she deliberately mispronounces the name of a tractor brand in order to keep massaging the masculine ego of the customer on the other end of the phone. X’s experiences belong to the 90s only on paper. In practice, they extend easily into 2026. So yes, now is exactly the kind of time this call should happen.

Thinking back to that first viewing in that small gallery, it feels fitting that the work resists a clean ending. Like a phone call that ends without a clear goodbye, it cuts off mid rhythm, leaving the line oddly open. X’s phone sex chapter brings to mind Judy in Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (1996), especially when Judy is coached to sound more like a stereotypical white woman. The difference is that Tuomaala, quite understandably, never makes you feel for X in the same way.

Although the ending is slightly awkward, the original music that closes the piece helps absorb that jolt. The work, overall, invites speculation about what it chooses not to pursue. There is room to wonder how it might have evolved more creatively through bolder formal decisions, particularly in its dealing with archival material and the supplementary shots that feel more utilitarian than considered.

Yet these limitations somehow settle into the work’s internal logic and allow it to function as a cohesive whole with its own peculiar style rather than a loosely stitched pastiche of the 90s. Yes, the call may at times feel awkward, but the voice behind the call knows what it is doing after all.

All The Light That Remains (2025)

Image: Still from All The Light That Remains (2025) / DocPoint

There is always something austere about films that begin from the idea of what remains. Moona Pennanen’s All The Light That Remains [Kaikki jäljelle jäävä valo] holds onto that formally restrained space early on, and asks the viewer to stay with the aftermath instead of chasing explanations. For a young filmmaker, that is an ambitious way to claim a voice. What sticks around after the 25-minute runtime is the mood the film generates, and much of that effect comes from Jesse Jalonen’s eye-catching cinematography and Pennanen’s consistent pacing. Taken as a whole, the film points to a personal style of working that does feel well thought-out, and it is a pleasant surprise to see that kind of clarity for such an early work.

All the Light That Remains is a hybrid documentary set in the abandoned mining village of Mätäsvaara, where the present collides with an uneasy past. The film opens with a group of young Ukrainians arriving by van. It never clearly spells out who they are or why they are there. At first they could pass for a group on a field trip, but through small visual cues and narrative detours, the film allows the viewer to infer that they are seasonal workers brought in for reforestation.

When the main character Oleksander enters the communal building where they are staying and finds an empty room, he meets another newcomer, Mykyta. The two form a loose duo, wandering around the village and picking up fragments of its history along the way. As they move through the village, they cross paths with a couple of Finnish geologists surveying the mine for a possible reopening, as rising molybdenum prices have brought new attention to the site.

Before going further, some context for Politiikasta readers can be useful. Mätäsvaara is located in Lieksa, North Karelia, on the eastern side of Lake Pielinen near the border with Nurmes. It was built rapidly during the wartime period as a purpose-made mining community, with housing and basic services organized around the mine itself.

The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

Today, the Finnish Heritage Agency lists Mätäsvaara as a nationally significant built cultural environment, mainly because its town plan was designed by Alvar Aalto. The mine operated as a molybdenum sulfide site and played a role in the German wartime industry. Molybdenum is used in alloy steels, including those required for arms production. A Lieksa city guide also marks the location of an “old prison camp” and notes that prisoners of war were brought to the mine as labor. During the Continuation War, Finland held roughly 64,000 Soviet soldiers as prisoners of war, along with about 5,700 taken during the earlier Winter War.

What matters for the film, however, is how this history is recorded. In official Finnish and international sources, these prisoners are not listed by modern national identities. They are consistently described as “Soviet prisoners of war”. In Finnish archives they appear as neuvostosotavangit or neuvostoliittolaiset sotavangit. In some cataloguing practices, the label “Russian” is used as a practical shorthand, even though broader historical accounts continue to frame them as Soviet prisoners.

Even an older MTV3 feature on a musical set in Mätäsvaara, for example, refers to “Russian prisoners of war” working at the mine in the summer of 1944. Against this background, Pennanen’s decision to foreground a specifically Ukrainian identity in the film for these prisoners appears to be deliberate. It intensifies the emotional weight of the setting and strategically taps into the current resonance of Ukrainian identity in Europe (without this adjustment the film’s structure falls apart). Is this a flaw? Not necessarily.

Cinema has always depended on dramatization, on bending and compressing reality in order to make it felt. The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

The film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that.

The film seems caught between two impulses that pull in opposite directions and they end up cancelling each other out, undermining the film’s overall coherence. As noted earlier, much of the film’s weight is carried by its beautiful cinematography, evident, for example, in the camera movement in the forest, wide shots at the beginning and the atmospheric cutaway shots toward the end. In its technical approach, these moments recall another film with “light” in its title, All We Imagine as Light, awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2024.

The other pull comes from the script, which fails to rise to the level of the visual work and instead drags the film down. Rather than trusting the images, the script clings to them as a way to force its themes through. Its ideas about time, space, and inherited suffering are pushed so insistently through bland over-explanation that the visual language begins to suffocate under the weight. Artificial staging and poorly ordered dialogue only add to the problem. As cinematography reaches for subtext, the script uncreatively spoon feeds the audience with meaning (for example by long verbal padding about “grains”), and the two never stylistically align.

The clunky editing only amplifies the script’s weaknesses. The two geologists are poorly integrated into the narration, appearing like summoned ghosts who surface now and then to recite background information. Rather than enriching the film, they interrupt its visual logic. The opening quote from The Man Without Qualities does important work, grounding the film in an idea of time piling up beneath us while we pretend to stand on something stable. Yet it is hard to ignore that the real men without qualities here are the people on screen themselves, reduced to particles by a romanticized gaze. The world around them remains intact with its traumas, continuing to reproduce hierarchical ways of seeing, while even nature is stripped of specificity and turned into a symbolic pressure placed on the characters.

If this review runs longer than the others, it is because the film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that. For all its tensions, the film leaves a clear impression and makes Pennanen a filmmaker worth paying attention to right now.

Vuoiŋŋat (2025)

Image: Vuoiŋŋat (2025) / Docpoint

Marja Viitahuhta’s Vuoiŋŋat reminds us of a dark chapter in European history, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a documented movement now known as “scientific racism” used pseudo-scientific authority to justify imperialism, colonial domination, and ideas of white superiority, while legitimizing discrimination, the collection of human bodies, and state policy.

Germany became an early center for this thinking, with the founding of the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905 by Alfred Ploetz, promoting concepts of “racial health” and “purity” that later intensified across Europe in the 1930s. In the Nordics, a key milestone was the establishment of the State Institute for Racial Biology in Sweden’s Uppsala in 1922, led by Herman Lundborg, one of the most influential race scientists of the period. In this period, the Sámi population was systematically targeted by racial biology research through physical measurements and the removal of human remains.

In Finland, a major racial research program operated during the 1920s and 1930s under Professor Yrjö Kajava, during which approximately 37 percent of the Finnish Sámi population, totaling 795 individuals, were subjected to anthropometric measurement between 1926 and 1934. Within this context, grave disturbances are documented, including a 1934 anthropological expedition that exhumed seventy skeletons from the old cemetery island in Inari for study at the University of Helsinki. These remains later became the subject of long repatriation efforts, with ninety-five Sámi remains returned in 1995 and a further 172 repatriated in 2001 to the Sámi Museum Siida.

Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

In August 2022, Sámi human remains removed from burial grounds during the era of European racial science were reburied in Inari, Utsjoki, and Nellim in ceremonies led by Sámi communities in collaboration with church and state representatives. Viitahuhta dedicates her work to the Sámi ancestors whose remains were taken from their graves in the name of racial research.

Viitahuhta’s piece is a five-minute cameraless video built from animated digital auroras and a luohti performed by Sámi musician Ánnámáret, where the yoik gives voice to spirits that have been left without a place to rest. The title Vuoiŋŋat comes from the Northern Sámi word for spirits or life force, a term connected to the verb meaning “to breathe” and is used in Sámi cultural contexts to refer to ancestral or collective spirit. The Sámi political slogan ČSV includes the phrase Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa! which is translated as “Show Sámi Spirit” where vuoiŋŋa is interpreted as “Sámi spirit” showing the word’s use to express presence or collective soul.

If you allow yourself to get lost into Viitahuhta’s experiment with form, the digitized images start to pull you in. Hold your gaze long enough and pareidolia kicks in. Shapes appear, and suddenly you wonder if the spirits are there on the screen, if they are watching you back, if one of them just waved at you.

Ánnámáret’s wordless vocalization carries the experience forward and holds it together. When her vocal register drops near the end into a deeper, grounded sound, it feels like another presence stepping in, as if a spirit is finally speaking plainly and letting its grief surface. Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

Rather than following a normative Western approach to her material, Viitahuhta’s work opens toward another way of thinking, one that the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida helps put into words. As Nishida explained it, Western thought tends to treat form as being itself and formal completion as a measure of value, while East Asian thought allows for seeing the form of the formless and hearing the sound of the soundless. Without this kind of experimentation and had Viitahuhta adhered to a fixed Western ideal of form, the work would not reach the emotional force it carries.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the university of Helsinki.

National Short Film Competition 1: The Verge of New, 2: Side by Side, and 3: Flashbacks are screened at DocPoint-festival between 3.–8.2.2026. Check the screening programme for showtimes.

Article images: DocPoint Helsinki

Read all Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in english here.
All Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in Finnish here.

Update 27.2.2026: Film names and link to screening schedule added

Julkaisu DocPoint 2026: From Calls to Spirits: Three New Finnish Films ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.