Film producer Iikka Vehkalahti has died

Film producer and instructor Iikka Vehkalahti has died. He was 75 years old. Information about the death was confirmed to HS from Vehkalahti’s surrounding area.

Vehkalahti was one of Finland’s most respected documentarians. He started as a journalist and filmmaker in the late 1970s. He directed 20 documentaries and was a producer in over a hundred documentaries. Vehkalahti worked as a producer of Yle’s Documentary Project between 1998 and 2015 and also worked as a film teacher and lecturer in Finland and abroad.

Many of his own films dealt with life in developing countries outside of the Western perspective.

Vehkalahti was a visiting professor of journalism at the University of Tampere in 2011–2012.

He received the state award for information disclosure in 2002, and in 2012 he was awarded at the Doc Point film festival for his merits as a promoter of Finnish documentary film.

“In the midst of entertainment, there are millions of people who are interested in alternative perspectives. They experience the attraction and fear-reducing significance of the documentaries,” Vehkalahti told Helsingin Sanomat in the interview in the summer of 2019.