News

The Estonian film industry is expanding, which is resulting in a bigger impact at home and abroad.

The Estonian film industry is expanding, which is resulting in a bigger impact at home and abroad.

This year has seen 10 new Estonian features released in cinemas, compared to five in 2015. Admissions for local films are also up, with a tally of over 300,000 mid-way through 2016 compared to 350,000 for the whole of 2015.

The additional theatrical offerings made up of largely European, Russian and American cinema brought the 2015 box-office to €15.5m.

Film Funds

One contributing factor to industry development is the growing number of film funds provided by the Estonian government.

Adding to the Estonian Film Institute’s (Efi) support for features, shorts, animation and docs, the government has issued further funding for a selection of films centred around the Republic of Estonia’s 100 year-anniversary in 2018. The films were chosen from a three-year long competition, and are predominantly...

Estonian director’s new film will be part of Serbian festival’s 14-strong competition including My Mother, 45 Years and Heil; festival to fete five Spanish directors.

Roukli, the new film by Estonia’s Veiko Õunpuu, will have its world premiere in the 22nd edition of European Film Festival Palić (July 18-24).

This year’s festival will open with Magnus von Horn’s The Here After, while the main competition consists of 14 films, including recent Karlovy Vary titles The World Is Mine by Nicolae Constantin Tanase and Heil by Dietrich Brüggemann, as well as Cannes entries Rams by Grimur Hakonarson, Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, Panama by Pavle Vučković and Berlin title 45 Years.

The perennial Underground Spirit Award will be bestowed upon five Spanish film-makers: Ion de Sosa, Chema Garcia Ibarra, Luis Lopez Carrasco, Miguel Llanso, and Velasco Broca.

“At the time the world economic crisis struck Spain, leaving behind negative impacts on its cinema, a group of...

Estonian director’s new film will be part of Serbian festival’s 14-strong competition including My Mother, 45 Years and Heil; festival to fete five Spanish directors.

Roukli, the new film by Estonia’s Veiko Õunpuu, will have its world premiere in the 22nd edition of European Film Festival Palić (July 18-24).

This year’s festival will open with Magnus von Horn’s The Here After, while the main competition consists of 14 films, including recent Karlovy Vary titles The World Is Mine by Nicolae Constantin Tanase and Heil by Dietrich Brüggemann, as well as Cannes entries Rams by Grimur Hakonarson and Nanni Moretti’s Panama by Pavle Vučković and Berlin title 45 Years.

The perennial Underground Spirit Award will be bestowed upon five Spanish film-makers: Ion de Sosa, Chema Garcia Ibarra, Luis Lopez Carrasco, Miguel Llanso, and Velasco Broca.

“At the time the world economic crisis struck Spain, leaving behind negative impacts on its cinema, a group of...

by Vadim Rizov

Veiko Õunpuu's second film, The Temptation of St. Tony, offers special thanks to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Buñuel in the end credits. That's apt for a film whose skepticism about religion as a redemptive force resembles the latter and which pays explicit homage to the former in a song cue. Odetta's "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," used during the Nativity sequence of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, plays over a cannibalism scene directly reminiscent of Porcile. Despite that double-barreled reference, Õunpuu denies any direct influence: in an interview last year, he allowed that "the homage to all of them" (Tarkovsky, Fellini, Lynch and Bresson as well) "is there, whether I like it or not."

He very much does like it. His first film Autumn Ball reveled in post-Soviet architecture and dour, lifeless color. Despite one character's outburst that "Baltic consciousness" is a...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Black Lightning" (2009)

Directed by Dmitriy Kiselev and Aleksandr Voytinskiy

Released by Universal Studios

"Wanted" director Timur Bekmambetov produced this Russian action flick about a man and his flying car, using the same effects team that worked on all of his previous films including "Night Watch." A Russian trailer is here since where we're going, we don't need to understand words.

"7th Hunt" (2010)

Directed by Jon Cohen

Released by Vanguard Cinema

A motley group of young adults are abducted and forced to fend for their survival at an abandoned military training center in the middle of nowhere in Jon Cohen's thriller.

"Alien Vs. Ninja" (2010)

Directed by Seiji Chiba

Released by Funimation

A selection of last year's New York Asian Film Festival, Seiji Chiba's crazy genre mashup may just be "the best and wittiest movie ever to air at 2am on the SyFy Channel" in the future,...

Just as it seems like festival season is winding down, it winds back up, proving there really is no festival season, it's a year-round whirlwind that none of us can escape.

As of late we've been pimping the New York Asian Film Festival like a class-a whore, but there'll be none of that trashy talk when discussing the veteran Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, now in its 45th year, and taking place in well, the spa city of Karlovy Vary, in good ol' Czech Republic. The fest runs from July 2nd -10th with the Oscar winning Crazy Heart opening and Pascal Chaumeil's Heartbreakers (L´arnacoeur) closing. This year's recipient of that lil' guy up in the pic, the Crystal Award, is Burnt by the Sun director, Nikita Mikhalkov. The real heart of the fest lies in an eclectic lineup, which features a hefty order of new Eastern European offerings.

And the first announcement is upon us and includes quite a few movies we've already reported on.. What does that include?

The incredible looking Estonian drama The Temptation of St. Tony for which we got the exclusive trailer on a while ago. It's by Veiko Õunpuu who did the incredible Sügisball and I'm greatly looking forward to seeing this.

From Spencer Susser, the director of the incredible zombie short I love Sarah Jane comes Hesher, his first feature which stars Jgl!

David Michôd's Australian thriller Animal Kingdom which stars Guy Pearce.

From Taiki Waititi, director of Eagle vs Shark comes Boy which we previously reported on, but then it was known as The Volcano.

Full list after the break!

U.S. Documentary Competition

This year’s 16 films were selected from 862 submissions. Each film is a world premiere.

Bhutto (Directors: Jessica Hernandez and Johnny O'Hara; Screenwriter: Johnny O'Hara)—A riveting...

From Veiko Õunpuu, the director of Sügisball (review), which I absolutely loved, comes his next film, The Temptation of St. Tony, which seems to have something to do with some Christian mythos I have yet to figure out.

We posted the teaser for this incredible looking film last year, and we've been in touch with the folks behind it since.. and today, we present to you the exclusive trailer for the second film out of Estonia we're covering, and something I'm highly looking forward too. It's in the spiritual vein of David Manuli's Beket, but not as abstract.

The film will be released in Estonia on October 10th and is an Estonian, Swedish (Atmo, the folks behind Metropia), and Finnish co-production.

The most stupendous and bone chilling tragedy about the agony and decline of one middle-level manager.

Tony develops an aversion to gushing claims of his goodness and the issue starts to haunt him.

Year: 2007

Directors: Veiko Õunpuu

Writers: Veiko Õunpuu & Mati Unt (novel)

IMDb: link

Trailer: link (Nsfw)

Review by: quietearth

Rating: 7 out of 10

A film which is revealed in two simple quotes, one at the start, and one at the end, Sugisball felt a lot like my time spent in New York. I'd look out the window or walk down the street and wonder what all those lives were doing crammed into those little boxes stacked atop one another, and this film gave me a glimpse. Starting with a flyover of row upon row of gloomy, nondescript apartment blocs which to me, implied a dead end, Sugisball is a stunningly shot Estonian drama which follows the lives of multiple characters as they try to manage existence.

I'm not going to reveal the last quote, but I'll share the telling first, told by an outside character at a literature conference to one of our main characters,...

Rain Tolk In Director Veiko ÕUNPUU'S SÜGISBALL. Courtesy Strand Releasing. Artists' creativity is sometimes directly proportional to their life experience, and Estonian writer-director Veiko Õunpuu has more than enough to draw on. Õunpuu was born in 1972 on Saaremaa, the biggest island belonging to Estonia, and graduated from high school in 1990 just as the country was glimpsing independence due to the dissolution of the Ussr. Over the next 10 years, Õunpuu had numerous identities: a tyre repair worker, an asylum seeker in Finland, a student at the Estonian Business School, a failed carpet salesman in Sweden, a driver on Hardi Volmer's Estonian movie All My Lenins, an advertising agency employee, a backpacker in Asia, and finally a...

PARIS -- Estonian writer-director Veiko Ounpuu was crowned with the Marrakech International Film Festival's top prize for his first feature, Autumn Ball, as the glamorous fest wrapped in the Moroccan city Saturday night.

The dark comedy about a group of people during the transition period after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been a festival favorite, having previously won the Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival and earning a spot in the AFI Fest's competition section in the fall. Ounpuu also won the director's prize at the Thessaloniki Film Fest just weeks before.

Produced by Kuukulgur Film, the movie beat out the 14 other international feature films in competition for the fest's prestigious Golden Star grand prize.

Gallic superstar Catherine Deneuve handed the trophy to the film's producer Katrine Kissa, who told the crowd: "We don't speak the same language, but we share the same language: that of humanism."

The Jury Prize went to both Brillante Ma.

Estonian Film Foundation

Strong on atmosphere and angst, the multistrand drama Autumn Ball takes its time bringing together its orbiting characters, a half-dozen aching souls in a housing complex on the outskirts of Tallinn, Estonia. Although it sometimes suffers from ennui overload, the film gets under the skin, its darkly comic observations filtered through Tarkovsky, Kieslowski and Cassavetes but alive with their own bracing melancholy. Winner of the Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival and a competition selection at the recent AFI Fest, the film is sure to make an impression as it travels the fest circuit.

Writer-director Veiko Ounpuu's adaptation of Sugisball (Autumn Ball), a 1979 novel by Mati Unt, a leading literary figure of Soviet-era Estonia, is set in the pre-independence 1980s. The future-forward high-rise suburb at the center of the story, abutted by desolate fields, stands as a dated monument to the crumbling USSR. Striking lensing by Mart Taniel makes the most of the cold natural light, penetrating the facades of the well-played characters and the sad spaces they inhabit. Ulo Krigul's brooding score is a key asset as well, especially in the film's wordless stretches, like the powerful breakup scene that opens the film.

Writer Mati (Rain Tolk) stands on his apartment balcony as though poised between life and death. His farewell hug to his departing wife (Mirtel Pohla) turns into a desperate attack. Left alone, he soon embarks on a binge. When not at his typewriter in a room that appears to be constructed of books, he's out making a fool of himself at clubs.

Alcohol comforts and undoes many of the characters. Fueled by brandy, self-consciously fashionable architect Maurer (Juhan Ulfsak) is heartlessly honest with his unhappy wife, Ulvi (Tiina Tauraite). A single mother (Maarja Jakobson) fends off the blunt overtures of strangers, calming her nerves with dainty glasses of liqueur. Sobbing over the "forbidden love" of The Thorn Birds, she's unaware that her young daughter (Iris Persson) is drawn to Kaski (Sulevi Peltola), a friendless barber.

For Theo (Taavi Eelmaa), a doorman at a depressing red-curtained nightclub, the opiate of choice is sex. He tallies his one-night stands -- first name and astrological sign -- adding numbers 210 and 211 after a spirited threesome. But like most everything here, the encounter ends on a note of disconnection. In their botched, often cruel encounters, the characters are often monstrous. In their aloneness -- whether writing, dancing solo or eating breakfast -- they become more human.