A Tale of a New Era · Book One
HISTORY ON A STORY ARC
Feature documentary · 105 minutes · Finland
Rough cut completed · Festival submissions underway
By placing the dramatic arc over the timeline of history, a Finnish documentary filmmaker asks whether humanity is not merely making history, but living within a story already underway.
About the film
A fourteen-year search for a language
History on a Story Arc is the opening feature documentary of A Tale of a New Era. Beginning with a personal and academic crisis in 2012, the film follows a fourteen-year search for a language capable of describing continuity across lived experience, Scripture and history.
A master’s thesis on Paul’s Letter to the Romans reaches a conceptual dead end.
Experiences bring apparently separate events into relationship.
Earlier questions return in new forms — a seven-era model of historical movement.
A large language model enters the screenwriting process.
Rough cut completed; festival submissions underway. Release 2027.
The inquiry begins when work on a master’s thesis concerning Paul’s Letter to the Romans reaches a conceptual impasse. A sequence of experiences in Finland and Jerusalem brings apparently separate events into an unexpected relationship. Across the years that follow, earlier questions return in new forms and gradually develop into a seven-era model of historical movement.
The hypothesis
The film proposes that the period extending approximately from 3000 BCE to 3000 CE may constitute a dramatic arc. By placing this arc over the historical timeline, it asks whether the present may be approached as a phase of anagnorisis: the moment in which the underlying situation becomes recognizable and preceding events acquire meaning as parts of a larger whole.
The inquiry
Two ways of seeing history
At the centre of the film are two ways of seeing history.
The language of agency
History as a field shaped by human choices, intentions and attempts to control events.
The language of drama
The human being placed upon the stage of history, participating in an action already underway.
The human prompts; the model maps
In 2025, a large language model enters the screenwriting process. The filmmaker brings experience, questions, sources and direction into the dialogue; the model maps relationships and proposes formulations; the filmmaker evaluates, verifies and rewrites them. What begins as a practical method for organising accumulated material becomes part of the historical development the film is examining.
History on a Story Arc establishes the hypothesis and historical framework from which the remaining six films of A Tale of a New Era proceed.
Film information
Credits & status
- Title
- History on a Story Arc
- Project
- A Tale of a New Era — Book One
- Format
- Feature documentary
- Running time
- 105 minutes
- Country of production
- Finland
- Filming locations
- Rural Southern Finland and Jerusalem
- Language
- English
- Written and directed by
- Laurentius Paulus
- Produced by
- Woodslope Cabin
- Production company
- Woodslope Cabin
- Production status
- Rough cut completed; final post-production in progress
- Festival status
- Rough cut submitted to the Sundance Film Festival
- Expected release
- 2027
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