Sulev Luik
A movie about the life in a small Estonian city in the 1950s. Young people face an instinct for survival that shatters ideals but can also destroy lives.
A first film made of the 1949 March deportation of Estonian people to Siberia by Soviet Secret Police NKVD. During couple of days and nights nearly 21 thousand people, mostly women and children, were under top secret taken from their homes to railway stations and locked into animal wagons to take a trip of thousands of kilometers to a far, poor, unfriendly and cold land where they were mostly used as cheap (free) labor.
Roman Baskin's debut as a film director is an allegorical story of a man (Sulev Luik) who happens to step out of a train in a small town named Vernanda. He buys some bread only to discover that it has got a bomb inside and "souvenirs" of this kind are the town's trademark. While the man wants desperately to get rid of the bomb the townsfolk is not amused by such rude behaviour.
Viktor Kingissepp has been the underground head of the Communist Party of Estonia for three years. He corresponds with Moscow, writes speeches for the members of the Communist Workers' Party and makes leaflets for the events of trade union. His purpose is to overthrow the Republic of Estonia since he does not believe in Estonian independence nor in any national ideals. Yet the clock keeps ticking, tuberculosis is widely spread, the world revolution is being postponed. What to do in order to make one's efforts work?
After WW-2 the Estonian forests are full of armed groups - the forest-brothers who carry on the fight against communism. Soviet secret police sends spies among them. The spies are sent under top secrecy, so no-one actually knows who is who. This is a game of cat and mouse, waiting a weaker to make a mistake. For remark, this is a Soviet spy film with adequate moral.
Police get a call-out to a lonely hotel in the Alps. When an officer gets to the hotel everything seems to be alright. Suddenly an avalanche cuts them off from the rest of the world and strange things are starting to happen.
