DANIEL PAAVOLA

Laurentius Paulus is the name under which Daniel Paavola — a Finnish documentary filmmaker, writer and journalist based in Porvoo — keeps the research journal of A Tale of a New Era.

Why Laurentius Paulus

Laurentius Paulus follows an old scholarly custom: from the Renaissance onwards, writers who took part in learned public debate often rendered their names in Latin — as Mikael Agricola and Carl Linnaeus did. Lauri is the Finnish form of Laurentius, and Paavola comes from Paavo, the Finnish form of Paul — in Latin, Paulus. Daniel, his middle name, is the name he uses as a filmmaker.

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History as something lived

Born in Finland, Paavola spent part of his childhood in Israel in the 1970s as the child of Finnish missionary workers. Israel has remained a recurring point of return: he has visited or lived in the country across six different decades. These repeated encounters — with the same places transformed by time, and with his own changing position in relation to them — formed an early experience of history as something lived rather than merely observed.

Other frameworks

During the 1990s and early 2000s, extended journeys through Africa and Asia exposed him to radically different cultural frameworks and to the disorientation of culture shock. The experience deepened his interest in how language, tradition and social environment shape what human beings perceive as reality. Alongside these journeys he trained in youth work and journalism, and later spent ten years working with young people and in child welfare — work that gave the inquiry a practical foundation in human development, crisis, continuity and change.

An impasse that became an inquiry

Paavola went on to study philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. In 2012 his master’s thesis on Paul’s Letter to the Romans reached a conceptual impasse, followed by burnout. What first looked like the collapse of an academic project became the beginning of a different form of inquiry — one pursued through lived experience, personal memory, historical texts, travel, visual models and documentary film.

Over the following fourteen years the research developed alongside ordinary life rather than within an academic institution. Its central question became how continuity might be described when the language of individual agency no longer seems sufficient. This led him to distinguish between two ways of seeing history: as a field shaped by human action, and as a dramatic movement in which the human being takes part as a protagonist.

A dialogue with the model

In 2025 he began using large language models as practical tools in the screenwriting process — to organise material, develop synopses and examine the relationships proposed by a seven-era model he had developed over the preceding years. The work evolved into a dialogue between lived experience and computational language, in which intuitively perceived relationships could be tested across historical texts, traditions and conceptual vocabularies. This journal is the record of that dialogue.

The films

His debut feature documentary, History on a Story Arc, brings this journey into cinematic form. Filmed primarily in rural Southern Finland and in Jerusalem, it places the dramatic arc over the historical timeline and asks what becomes visible when humanity is understood not only as an agent shaping history, but as a protagonist taking part in an action already underway. It is the opening film of A Tale of a New Era, a seven-year cinematic research programme produced through Woodslope Cabin, in which film, essays, visual models and dialogue develop together.

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