Film Screenings / Programs / Series
SPOTLIGHT ON ESTONIAN CINEMA
October 13 – October 19
This brief series shines a spotlight on what is, from the U.S. vantage point, an undeniably obscure, unexplored feature of the filmic landscape: the cinema of Estonia. Guest-curated by Tallinn-based curator, Greete Põrk (Director of the Freedom Fries Alternative American Film Festival), the series showcases five feature films, spanning the 1960s to the present day, that chart the course of Estonian cinema from the Soviet period, through perestroika, to independence. Ranging from wartime allegorical fable to socially critical psychological drama to sci-fi, the selection includes the remarkable DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL (an adaptation of the novel by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky, which will also screen as part of our Strugatsky brothers film series in November), and culminates with the uncategorizable fantasias of contemporary filmmaker Veiko Õunpuu.
Guest curated by Greete Põrk, who also wrote all the film descriptions below. Co-presented by Freedom Fries Alternative American Film Festival; special thanks to the Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia.
Veiko Õunpuu
THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY / PÜHA TÕNU KIUSAMINE
2009, 114 min, 35mm, b&w. In Estonian, Russian, English, French, and German with English subtitles.
Bizarre and beautiful, disturbing and droll, this film ponders what it means to be a good man. Kicking off with a quotation from Dante’s INFERNO, the delirious sophomore feature from the Estonian filmmaker Veiko Õunpuu observes Tony, a triumphantly depressed middle manager. Plagued by an adulterous wife and a boss who orders him to fire all his factory workers, Tony descends into a midlife crisis that manifests as a series of increasingly hilarious, horrific visions. Or are they? Resembling a grown-up version of the hero of David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD, Tony seems at times a two-dimensional character traversing a multidimensional, Lynchian landscape. Greeting every experience – his father’s funeral, a pile of severed hands, an abused girl – with a single, stunned expression, he questions not only his faith but also the utility of morality. At the same time, his marriage, friendships, and emptied-out factory, defined by depravity and desolation, symbolize an ethical void that’s terrifyingly familiar. Õunpuu questions whether capitalism and goodness can coexist. (We’re all still waiting for the answer to that one.)
Fri, Oct 13 at 6:30 and Thurs, Oct 19 at 7:30.
Veiko Õunpuu
ROUKLI
2015, 99 min, digital. In Estonian with English subtitles.
In a near-future Europe, an unspecified war is raging. As the cities become deadly battle zones, a group of young bohemians shelter on a remote farm near a desolate stretch of coastline. Music teacher Eeva and her composer husband Villu are the owners, while Eeva’s brother Jan, a cynical, prickly, dissolute writer, is their guest. When Jan angers his hosts by inviting his ex-girlfriend Marina to join them, tensions begin to crackle between the couples as they drink, dance, flirt, play music, and debate questions about individual existence, love, and art. But the war soon intrudes into their cozy private party. Disorder descends with the arrival of two desperate refugees who are fleeing a fearsome local outlaw named Peedu. Õunpuu’s striking use of screenwipes, disorienting sound design, and trippy camera effects suggest some kind of rupture in the cosmic order. Chaos reigns.
ROUKLI is a minimalist, slow-paced collective experiment. Shot on a minimal budget, much of it crowd-sourced online, ROUKLI was largely improvised on location at the director’s own rural farmhouse. Its starting point was an untranslatable Inuit concept: “Iktsuarpok,” that vague feeling of anticipation that leads you to keep looking outside to see if someone is coming.
Fri, Oct 13 at 9:00 and Sun, Oct 15 at 6:00.
Kaljo Kiisk
MADNESS / HULLUMEELSUS
1968, 78 min, 35mm, b&w. In Estonian with English subtitles.
Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s leadership brought new opportunities for Estonian cinema, as evidenced by Kaljo Kiisk’s MADNESS, which is set in a picturesque mental hospital right before the end of WWII. A police force is ordered to identify a spy amongst the patients. But who is really the mad one in this story? The people in the hospital who have not been able to resist the inhumanity of the totalitarian regime and are really sick? Or, perhaps, the ‘normal’ one who credulously follows the tenets of law and order? Cinematographically and artistically original, thematically rich, and hauntingly ambiguous, MADNESS is one of the most remarkable films in Estonian film history. Its bold sociopolitical statements led to its being censored outside Estonia until perestroika.
Sat, Oct 14 at 5:00 and Sun, Oct 15 at 8:30.
Leida Laius & Arvo Iho
WELL, COME ON, SMILE / NAERATA OMETI
1985, 85 min, 35mm. In Estonian with projected English subtitles.
Based on the book STEPMOTHER by Silvia Rannamaa, WELL, COME ON, SMILE ranks among the classics of Estonian cinema. It is an engaging psychological drama following the fate of orphaned children in Soviet Estonia. For its era the film is unusually honest and socially critical. Although the winds of change in the Soviet Union were already blowing in 1985, this movie still managed to shock with its frank approach, capturing the naked truth of its times. Living in an orphanage, the protagonist Mari struggles to understand where she belongs, socially and culturally – an existential dilemma that by extension represents an entire generation of confused and lost children. In the film, the dilapidated Stalinist architecture, polluted environment, and damaged industrial landscapes signify the deterioration of the Soviet system. Yet what will the future look like?
Sat, Oct 14 at 7:00 and Sun, Oct 15 at 3:45.
Grigori Kromanov
THE DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL / ‘HUKKUNUD ALPINISTI’ HOTELL
1979, 80 min, 35mm. In Estonian with English subtitles.
This science fiction film is based on the novel of the same title by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (the subjects of an Anthology film series in November – see page ?). Policeman Peter Glebsky receives an anonymous call from the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel in the Alps and soon travels there himself. Not long after his arrival an avalanche cuts the hotel and its bizarre group of guests off from the rest of the world, and odd things start to happen. Glebsky takes up his investigation, but his rather inflexible methods shed little light on the strange goings-on. Glebsky represents the old rules, the idea of law and order, the measurability of all things, and man as the ultimate judge. But here he finds himself facing a world of the supernatural, the indefinable, of a future utopia, as embodied by the physicist Mr. Simonet and the hotel owner Alex Snewahr, as well as other characters with even stranger identities. These figures represent the transcendental system, the unknown other. Throughout the movie, the inspector tries to convince us that his handling of the situation was the appropriate one, but the film’s language suggests another way of looking at things.
Sat, Oct 14 at 9:00, Fri, Nov 10 at 7:00, and Sun, Nov 12 at 9:00.
