08. May 2012

100 Years of Estonian Film

In 1912 a strip of film was shot, depicting a flight of a plane over the city of Tartu. Unfortunately, this film The Flight of Utotshkin has since been lost, but that was the start of cinema for a small European country called Estonia.

100 years later we are still miraculously here, celebrating the first centennial of our filmmaking with all of our friends and co-conspirators all over the world. Miraculously, why? It has not always been easy. For a stint of 15 years (1932-1947) there were no feature films made at all, for commercial, technological and political reasons. During the Soviet times, we were kind of saved by the fact that the national film studio Tallinnfilm was established in 1963. The art of compromise ruled the day, and the squabbles with the centralized leadership and censors were commonplace.

Despite that, quite a few of Estonian all-time classics were made in the 60s and 70s. The end of both those decades brought a fresh wave of forwardthinking directors, whose works are valued today and will undoubtedly be tomorrow. The collapse of that national factory-style Tallinnfilm studio in 1992 brought uncertainty and chaos. Short-lived production companies with shady financing were making films to earn a quick buck, not really taking the possible future history into consideration. The whole structure was waiting to be reorganized and step by step it happened. Despite all this turmoil we have somehow managed to pull through, have been able to amass a small quantity of local (and sometimes international) success stories, and ready to face the next hundred years.

It is our utmost pleasure to be selected by the LET’S CEE Film Festival to be the country of focus in Vienna and to be able to promote our film art abroad together with the Estonian Embassy, to people who most likely have not heard anything about it. Georgica, Idioot/The Idiot and Disko ja tuumasõda/Disco and Atomic War are certainly films that we feel we can be proud of. I hope you like our films in sadness and joy and a small bit of them stays with you as a reminder of our culture.