‏Arto Halonen‏

Arto Halonen is internationally awarded fiction and documentary film director, screenwriter and producer, who is known for socially strong -stance subjects. He was born in Joensuu, Finland and he is known for instance of Princess (2010), A Patriotic Man (2013) and Shadow Of The Holy Book (2007).

As a tribute to his work, Halonen was awarded with the Finland Prize in 2005, the highest annual cultural prize given by the Minister of Education and Culture of Finland. In 2008, Halonen received the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award. The festival's official statement described Halonen as one of the most important documentary filmmakers of his time, saying his work contributes to the development of documentaries on an international scale.

In 2010, Halonen received the City of Helsinki Cultural Prize, which is so far only the third time a filmmaker has been awarded with this prize. Among other important prizes, he has received the Humanitarian Award of the European Union in 1998. Also, partly due to the success of Princess (2010), Halonen was given the Finnish National Mental Health Prize and the Civil Action Prize of the Finnish Federation for Social Welfare and Health, making him the first one in the cultural field to receive the prize.

Halonen is the founder and the first festival director of DocPoint, Helsinki Documentary Film Festival. During Halonen's tenure (2001-2004), DocPoint became the biggest documentary film festival in the Nordic area and one of the top documentary film festivals globally.