Ants Lauter
The story of Balthasar Russow, an Estonian pastor from the 16th century, his life and life's work - writing The Chronicle of Livonia
A medieval love story with lots of adventures. The times are troubled - there's a revolt of peasants going on. To secure its safety a monastery chases for a relics of a holy Brigitte. A nobleman promises to get it if he gets beautiful Agnes as a reward. But she fells in love with a handsome adventurer. The monastery has to act shrewd now and play double game. The movie is still the best achievement of the Estonian cinema. Based on a novel.
A group of sleepless nerds should be taken into sanitarium for hard-therapy. They are taken to a lonely island but no sanitarium is in sight. Suddenly turns out that the nurses have kidnapped the men and are about to give them the only useful medicine they need - fresh air and work. But the patients decide to disobey. There's only one solution - to escape. The film is absolute cult in Estonia.
A baron gives a poor peasant a well-paid job of a milkman but for reward he has to accept his beloved girl going to mansion time to time. Does the wealth outweigh the honor and conscience?
Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.
