High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Valentin Vaala was a Russian-born Finnish film director, who often also wrote the screenplays for and edited his own films. His career spanned several decades, from 1929 to 1973, and has been called one of the most significant, in both quality and popularity, in the history of Finnish cinema.As a teenager, Vaala befriended Theodor Tugai who later became known as a film director and actor under the name Teuvo Tulio and the pair recognized their common interest in films. They decided to start making films together, but their first feature-length attempt, Mustat silmät in 1929, never received wide distribution. Vaala himself was reportedly so disappointed with the resulting film that he dumped the original camera negatives into the sea. However, later in the same year, Vaala and Tulio partially remade the film as Mustalaishurmaaja for the Fennica-Filmi company. This film became a hit and earned the starring Tulio the nickname "Finland's Valentino". The pair went on to make two other films, Laveaa tietä (1931) and Sininen varjo (1933) with Vaala directing and Tulio starring.