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Selin/Mäkelä

 Director Aleksi Mäkelä  and producer Markus Selin are men behind the great success of Finnish movies made by Solar Films.


Director Aleksi Mäkelä
(Born 20.11.1969 in Helsinki)

Kuva: Solar Films / Timo Puustinen

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A self-taught movie director, Aleksi Mäkelä is the most successful of the modern era Finnish directors: the total domestic audience of his movies in theatrical release is ovar 2 million.
The Tough Ones (1999) was one of the initiators of the recent ascent of Finnish cinema, with an audience of 330,000.
The biggest domestic box office hit since the eighties, Bad Boys, drew a phenomenal audience of 615,000 in only 5 months. After that, Vares - Private Eye was also the number one domestic movie of its release year 2004.
His next movie Matti - Hell is for Heroes was the most popular film in Finland in 2006 with an audience of 462,000. The next number one domestic box office hit was Hellsinki in 2009.
Regardless of the genre, the common factors in Mäkelä’s movies are a masculine point-of-view, fast-paced action and a boyish sense of humor.
Hellsinki is his ninth feature film. His debut The Romanov Stones was released in 1993.
Besides movies, Mäkelä has directed hundreds of hours of TV series, commercials and music videos. He resides in Nummela, 40 km outside Helsinki.



Producer Markus Selin
(Born 16.3.1960 in Nummela)

Aleksiboxiin_kuvitus.jpg

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Solar Films / Jan Granström

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The most successful producer in the recent re-birth of popular Finnish cinema, Markus Selin has been behind the movies of Aleksi Mäkelä since 1994. The son of a movie theatre owner himself, Selin has literally absorbed movies since his early childhood.
Selin’s career as a movie producer started in the mid-eighties when he and young Renny Harlin made an international adventure thriller entitled Born American. Because of its anti-Soviet views during a time of extreme political sensitivity, the movie had to be put on hold by ocal censorship for over a year.
Since then Selin has reached a domestic audience of 3,5 million spectators in Finnish movie theaters.
Selin was chosen Finnish producer of the year in 1999. He has won the Finnish ‘most successful movie’ audience poll seven times and his movies have collected 29 Finnish Movie Awards.
Selin works as a producer in Solar Films, the company he founded in 1995. Under his management, the company has become the leading production company in Finland in the fields of drama and entertainment.
(Updated February 2010)

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