For those that haven't heard, there's a surprisingly large group of creative talent gathering here in Los Angeles, right under our noses, many of whom I am pleased to call friends.

For me, this creative talent pool centers around two of Europe's brightest stars.  Irina Bjorklund and Peter Franzen are the two most celebrated actors of Finland, and Irina boasts multiple best actress awards from her nation's film academy.  Both actors spend most of the year here in Los Angeles, working on the stage with the rest of my colleagues.

Both Irina and Peter appear in Red is the Color Of..., an independent feature written and directed by another Finnish talent who grew up here in the States, Anne Norda.  In particular, Irina's performance in that film as a woman cut off from her husband by ennui and a nude model, is both very risky and extremely finely tuned.  The film earned Best Feature at the La Femme Film Festival here in LA, and if anyone wants to borrow my copy, they are more than welcome to.  This is a picture that deserves to be seen, and both Irina and Anne prove themselves as forces to be reckoned with - using extremely limited resources to do it.

It's worth noting that Irina is also an internationally recognized singer and musician.

On the other hand, I recently saw Peter in a fantastic staged reading of a famous Finnish play, recently translated to English, called Haapoja.  The play itself is a wonderfully lyric work about a scoundrel condemned to die in a Finnish prison in the 1830's, and the upper-crust woman who takes it upon herself to convert him to Christianity in a ploy to control him.  Both Peter and another friend of mine, Nina Sallinen, gave shockingly threadbare, honest performances with only a week to prepare, and the work is being shaped for a stage run here in Los Angeles, sometime in the future, by the writer and director (also a Finn).  Given how the characters used artful language and comedy to heighten the tension and raise the stakes, I was actually reminded of Pulp Fiction.  So often, we see comedy as a cop-out, used to back out of a tense situation.  This was great theater.

I'm posting this here because these artists should be recognized for who and what they are.  They've already earned their stripes, in one of the two most creatively competitive regions in the world ( I refer to Europe and Asia ).  As Nina put it one evening last week: "The Finnish people, they get things done."

I am always happy to be an outspoken advocate for those I believe in.  If you're curious, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Yours in Service, T