The fourth feature-length film by Finnish director Arthur Franck, The Helsinki Effect [+lire aussi :
interview : Arthur Franck
fiche film], which is world-premiering in the main competition of CPH:DOX, is a playful and satirical take on a very serious subject: the Helsinki Accords, the result of the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE). Using archive footage, official transcripts, his own voice-over and AI-generated voices for Henry Kissinger and Leonid Brezhnev, Franck unwraps the forgotten event which, according to many historians, was a catalyst for the fall of the Iron Curtain. We spoke to the director about the film.

Cineuropa: How did you discover this topic and decide to make the doc?
Arhtur Franck: In the autumn of 2021, I had just finished my previous film and was again without a project. I work a lot with archival storytelling, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of making a film only with archives, as I don't really like the process of filming – it causes me too much stress.

I'd heard of the Helsinki Accords, but I’d never understood it that well, because it's very hard to explain what it was about, and I consider myself relatively well-informed. But everybody in Finland usually knows that a very big, important meeting took place here in 1975, led by our prime minister Urho Kekkonen. It turned out there was a lot of footage, and I read some books and realised that this story was very interesting and profound, but nobody had ever told it – at least not in the way I did. It was interesting that you can actually find how something that happened there affected something happening much later on. Then I stumbled upon the transcripts, which I had to include, as the footage mostly just scratches the surface.

How did you decide to use your own narration?
I needed another element to connect all of this, and I didn't want to do interviews. So, it had to be my voice-over, and then it was all about trying to find the tone. I always knew I wanted to make it funny, and that it was basically a comedy, or a satirical point of view, which also came from the material because the transcripts had so much humour and so many bizarre exchanges.

You also came up with these phone calls with Kissinger and Brezhnev, using AI to recreate their voices.
Because there was lots of information that needed to be included, I felt it would be boring to just have my narration. I had these snippets of what these guys had been saying about and around the conference. So, I just thought, “What if I put them into phone calls?” I tried it, and my editor [Markus Leppälä] said it worked. We could have added more people in these phone calls, but Kissinger and Brezhnev were the main characters and were the ones calling the shots.

The ripples of the CSCE later led to the forming of the OSCE, and events such as the Minsk Agreement of 1991 and the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, the consequences of which we see today with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But you decided not to go that far in the film – why?
If you comment on stories that are mostly situated in the past, you have to choose your cut-off point. And the effects of the Helsinki Accords can be interpreted in many ways. So, I chose to frame it in the sense that it’s that slow and boring diplomacy that actually changes the world. It's not the bombastic words of one newly elected arsehole or one dictator who says the world must go this way because of his own agenda. The hard work of what happens very slowly is not sexy at all for the ordinary person. And framing it in this way is not my idea. It’s other people’s assessment that it very much had something to do with the fall of authoritarian communism – people from behind the Iron Curtain who were living then and analysing things. Of course, it was not the only reason, but it's a kind of capsule of this. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Finnish president Alexander Stubb framed it pretty interestingly: he said that it's been 80 years since Yalta and 50 years since Helsinki, and the world needs less Yalta and more Helsinki. Yalta was just superpowers dividing up the world, and Helsinki was a common, very broad consensus, which everybody could say they were okay with. These are much more complicated processes, but they are usually the more sustainable ones, and they can actually create an impact.