Juhan Ulfsak
The Lapland tundra. Rupi is a young miner who fills his days by traficking in illegal pills, drinking, and dropping coins in a slot machine. After his friend is murdered, Rupi realises that he loves his friend’s widow. But the mine owner wants her too. The violence becomes a spectacle, the tragedy comic, the tundra cold, the people degenerate and hope ephemeral, like a star shooting through the sky. But even in this world, hope briefly rears its head.
Five fresh short films on the theme "With the best intentions" from even fresher Estonian directors.
A man falls off a roof. Another one drowns. Another catches fire. Wherever you look, men are dropping like flies. “May God rest their souls,” sigh the widows as they cross themselves somberly. This is the life and the death of the men in Virago—a village where for centuries no man has lived long enough to see his fortieth birthday. Until today.
In the midst of Stalinist tyranny, six-year-old Leelo's mother is sent to a prison camp. Haunted by her mother's last words telling her to be a good kid, Leelo vows to be on her best behaviour in the confusing grown-up world in the hope that it will bring her mother back.
Miami is the story of two sisters who have grown up separately. The older sister, Angela, is an exotic dancer with her own touring dance group. The younger, Anna, on the threshold of adulthood, lives in a small town working in sales. When their father dies, Anna looks for and finds Angela. The fascinating, high-strung Angela asks the timid Anna to accompany her on tour and, before long, trouble from Angela’s past catches up to them and the sisters’ love is put to the test.
The film consists of three chapters. The Manslayer takes place more than a hundred years ago. The leading character Maara is a young bride who is about to start her life in her new family. The Virgin, set in the spring of 1949, tells the story of a young woman called Elina, who has been deported from Ingria into Estonia during the previous war. The Shadow moves in the present, on the border of real life and fantasy. The main character, Luna Lee, has decided to flee from home. Is there anything besides emptiness somewhere? The film is led by the singularity of the leading character - Maara, Elina and Luna Lee are all played by the same actress.
A young man tries to make sense of the world in the summer heat of late nineties Estonia.
Roukli is a film about about love, war and something else. Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu (Autumn Ball, The Temptation of St. Tony, Free Range/Ballad on Approving of the World) made his new film Roukli without institutional financial support. The film was made through an experimental process of improvisation and financed through the Estonian crowdfunding platform Hooandja. According to Õunpuu, the reasons for turning to crowdfunding and improvisation for his new film were creative. “We find creative freedom in independence from institutional support,” Õunpuu said.
A 14-year-old boy in a stifling Helsinki slum takes some unwise life lessons from his soon-to-be-incarcerated older brother, in Finnish master Pirjo Honkasalo’s gorgeously stylized and emotionally devastating work about what we pass on to younger generations, and the ways we do it.
A demeaning game-show appearance, an ill-advised mushroom-picking outing that goes horribly off the rails, inquiries from a cynical reporter — things just keep getting worse for the middle-aged politician at the centre of Estonian director Toomas Hussar's satire about a shallow, fame-obsessed post-Cold War culture. (TIFF)
A mid-level manager who develops an aversion to being "good" finds himself confronting the mysteries of middle-age and morality as he loses grasp of what was once his quiet life.
A young writer called Mati is stalking his ex-wife, while also trying to make unsuccessful passes at other women. Augusti is a barber living a dreary bachelor life who forms a bond with little girl, but his approaches are misconstrued as pedophilia. Laura, a single mom, tears up over sappy soap operas, but refuses real-life advances from clueless men, because her ability to trust has been ruined by her violent drunk of an ex-husband. Maurer, the architect, worries about the wellbeing of humanity, but ignores his own wife Ulvi, who in turn looks for solace in the arms of a coatroom attendant named Theo. Women have always liked Theo, but due to his low social status, they don't take him seriously. All of these people might inhabit identical tower blocks, but they couldn't feel more alienated from each other if they tried.
A young intellectual, Mati, engineers himself into a situation where he has to spend a weekend with his wife Helina and her lover Eduard. The trio goes to Eduard's summer house, surrounded by the majestic scenery of big forests and an empty beach. Mati, either out of jealousy or pride, has decided to win back his wife and will do anything his introverted and inert mind can come up with. What is love? Who can believe in such a thing? Is there anything at all to believe in? It can in its own minimalist way be a very funny experience and also a sad one to be dragged into this world. This film depicts with great accuracy how it is to feel love being an Estonian, someone who is used to low temperatures and repressed emotions.
Scandalous TV journalists Rain Tolk and Ken Saan of Esto TV disguise as nationalists and infiltrate the conservative party Res Publica to expose xenophobia, racism and intolerance.
During the winter of 1991 in Riga, 18-year old Jazis’s life is fraught with complications. Even though Latvian national independence has been restored, the Soviet Army is still very much present in the country and Jazis is at risk of being conscripted and sent to fight in Afghanistan. In January, when the Soviet special services and military units attempt to overthrow the newly independent government, people start building barricades around strategically important buildings, and Jazis finds himself at the centre of events. Jazis has never taken interest in politics. He is preoccupied with “more important” things – bohemia, girls, and films. He does not actively participate in the barricades but is rather pulled into this festival of life and death by circumstance. There is another issue – unbeknownst to him, Jazis might have become a father. Or maybe not. Uncertainty is what most precisely defines public consciousness in the early 1990s in Latvia.
After 27-year-old Karmen's Father dies, the security structures of her previous life start falling apart, as her relationship with her half-brother Viktor also deteriorates, and she faces the darkness and emptiness of the universe.
