Kira Jääskeläinen

Kira Jääskeläinen (born 1979 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Finnish-Polish documentary film director.

Background Jääskeläinen was born in Poland into a family of artists, but moved to Finland at the age of five. In the early years of the 2000s Jääskeläinen studied humanities at the University of Copenhagen, concentrating in East European Studies and the Russian language, and wrote her MA thesis on the material she collected in Chukotka. Jääskeläinen has also studied classical music and plays the cello.

Films

Jääskeläinen's first documentary Takigaks – Once Were Hunters was released in 2012. It tells about two brothers, Kolya and Sasha, who are Siberian Yupiks and live in the village of Novoye Chaplino in the eastern extremity of the Chukotka Peninsula. Their community has traditionally practised whale hunting, but some of the youth find themselves in the midst of an identity crisis, if, for some reason, they do not find this profession appealing. The filming of this documentary took place over five years.

Jääskeläinen is working on a film on a one-hundred-year-old cello, which was found on a dumpster in Copenhagen, and another documentary film on Chukotka.

Filmography Takigaks – Once Were Hunters, 2012. Katharsis Films Oy. Northern Travelogues, 2019. Illume Oy.