Along the Road Little Child

This is a true-to-life film about a group of Finnish and Somali children seen through their common play, about two sets of siblings who met each other in the yard of their housing estate. The children’s play reflects the realities and moralities of the adult world and in it, the small events of their own world grow big and important.

Abdi, Nasteho, and Bisharo and their family moved from Somalia to Finland in the 1990s to escape the civil war. In the woods around their estate, they met 12-year-old Julia and her younger siblings. The children play together in the vacant lots and the woods of their neighbourhood, in a safe haven between busy thoroughfares – their own territory. They spend their time in the stairways and basements, build huts in the woods out of tyres, cardboard and plastic, and argue about God and Allah.

Their religious disputes are like a mirror of war and peace in the adult world and their games reflect in miniature the confrontation between Western and Islamic civilisations. In contrast to adults and their conflicts, the children forget their disputes in an instant. They return to building their huts as if nothing had happened. Although cultures also collide in the world of children, the collisions are soon absorbed by play.

Susanna Helke

(born 1967 in Tampere)

Education:
-Doctoral dissertation in the Film and TV Department of the University of Art and Design Helsinki will be published with the title “A Trace of Nanook: Cinematic Methods Intertwining Documentary and Fictional Styles” in March 2006.
- San Francisco State University, Cinema Department, Fall Semester, 1999.
- University of Art and Design Helsinki , Master of Arts in New Media 1997.
- University of Art and Design Helsinki , Master of Arts in Photography1996.
- Tampere University Department of Journalism and Mass Communication 1992 -1993.

Working as filmmaker and film teacher in Helsinki

Virpi Suutari

(born 1967 in Rovaniemi)

Education:
-University of Art and Design Helsinki, Master of Arts in Photography 1996
-Tampere University, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication 1992-1994

Working as filmmaker and freelance journalist in Helsinki