CLASSICS

A Stolen Meeting (1988)

Estonian Psychedelic Animation from 1970s

What Happened to Andres Lapeteus (1966)

Documentaries by Andres Sööt

The Misadventures of the New Satan (1964)

Corrida (1982)

A Woman Heats the Sauna (1979)

The Estonian Film Institute’s Film Heritage Department manages all the films made in the legendary Tallinnfilm studio during the years 1941–2001. In this catalogue, we proudly present some of that great legacy – a carefully curated selection of five distinctive feature films, a selection of animated films, and documentaries by Andres Sööt.

A Stolen Meeting (1988) was the seventh and last film by director Leida Laius (1923–1996), completed on the threshold of Estonian re-independence and during the Singing Revolution in 1988. In addition to the fate of women, the film also highlights themes of rootlessness and migration.

Andreas Trossek, art historian and critic writes about psychedelic Pop Art influenced animated films made in 1970s Estonia. Within the official cinema circles of the Soviet Union, animation was mainly targeted towards toddlers, young children, and teenagers. In Estonia, on the other hand, the artists had clearly used child-oriented cartoons as a means of artistic expression, and experimented with the possibilities of the film medium in general, and these selected films appear as fragmented manifestations of post-Second World War youth culture that also filtered into the 'wrong side' of the Iron Curtain.

What Happened to Andres Lapeteus? (1966) is the first domestic film to try and analyse the heritage of the Stalinist personality cult, and its influence on communist society. What Happened to Andres Lapeteus? was a remarkable work that has successfully stood the test of time, and acquires more and more layers of meaning in our current conflicted atmosphere of the first half of the 21st Century.

Johannes Lõhmus introduces Andres Sööt, the master of Estonian docu- mentary, whose sharp gaze has chronicled our life through good and bad, in the spins and swirls of history.

The Misadventures of the New Satan (1964) is co-directed by Jüri Müür and Grigori Kromanov. It’s a film where metaphysics and Estonian literary classics meet. The Misadventures of the New Satan is the last novel by Anton Hansen Tammsaare, the greatest writer of Estonian literature. By some miracle, this film with a deeply religious and philosophical subtext was shown all over the Soviet Union and became the first significant success in Estonian film history.

Corrida (1982), a psychological drama by Olav Neuland, reflects Estonian cinema in the beginning of the 1980s when the Soviet Empire started to show the first signs of deterioration.

Arvo Kruusement, one of the most beloved directors in Estonia whose feature film Spring has repeatedly been selected as the best feature film of all times in Estonia, released A Woman Heats the Sauna in 1979. In that period only films that reflected events that took place in either a historical or fictional past went into production. A Woman Heats the Sauna is a rare film that actually takes place in the present – in Soviet Estonia in the 1970s.

The seven articles in this booklet are all very different, both in content and style, introducing different films, but there is one thing that unites them all –Estonian culture and film history would not be the same without them. Enjoy the following in-depth texts, the films, and if you have any questions regarding Estonian film heritage, feel free to contact us at the Estonian Film Institute. EF

RAIN PÕDRA Head of Film Heritage Department

4 A Stolen Meeting

10 Pop Art in Animation