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The Database suggests: a selection of the latest documentaries

The number of documentaries produced annually in Estonia is about 20-25. They are depicting the actual issues, concerns, problems and challenges the society, culture and people are facing in their everyday life.

Films

Paradise Behind the Fence

2017 | Documentary, Problem oriented | Director: Aljona Suržikova, Julia Iskhakova

The preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, include big changes to the area. Do the small villages in the neighbourhood manage to stay alive and retain their everyday routine?

One of the biggest resorts with subtropical climate in Russia is Sochi. In 2014 there will be Winter Olympics. The president Putin has promised lots of snow for the games, no traffic jams and big investments. Austrian specialists already started planning big changes to the area. Do the small villages in the neighbourhood manage to stay alive and retain their everyday routine?
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Help, I Need Love

2017 | Documentary | Director: Minna Hint

Love is not for everybody.

Mati is a young man of 25 who has never experienced love. All of his friends are married or living with their girlfriends. Mati has never kissed a girl and all attempts to create a real loving relationship have failed. Mati is motivated to find the right girl. Someone with whom he could share love and build the first intimate relationship of his life.
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At Home with Refugees

2017 | Documentary | Director: Kristina Norman

Jana is a manager of an asylum centre in a small Estonian village. People from various culture and with different backgrounds are waiting for the verdicts that will change their destinies.

An accommodation center for asylum seekers in a small Estonian village. Being head of the center, a local woman Jana is in a double role. At the same time as she is a host to a multilingual family of the newly arrived, she also is a guest in their temporary home. On the squares of Estonian cities right-wing movements demonstrate against immigration. In the shared living space of the asylum center, it is hard to tell private from public, personal from official, as the common day-to-day life with its joys, miseries, and frictions, blurs the borders between professional duties and heartfelt gestures of welcome.
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Love...

2017 | Documentary | Director: Sandra Jõgeva

It happens in the best families.

Once-promising art student Veronika despises ordinary life, so she lets binge drinking and style games fill the void. Her sidekick, gorgeous homosexual Raivo is deeply but platonically in love with her. The love triangle is completed by ex-con Fred, a tragic figure who wants to abandon his past. He sees Veronika as his only savior, even after she stabs him severely. And there’s a baby on the way…
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Last Class at Kasari

2016 | Documentary | Director: Liis Lepik

A story of a countryside school in Estonia that will be shut down.

Kristo is a first grade student in Kasari School at Estonian countryside. During the school week he lives in the dormitory with his brother and two sisters. Warm relationships have developed between the children and the teachers but by the spring their school will be closed forever.
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Close Relations

2016 | Documentary | Director: Vitali Manski

Vitaly Mansky’s documentary journey through Ukraine visits members of his own family to show the reality behind the headlines in this divided country.

Russian citizen and Soviet-born Ukrainian native Vitaly Mansky crisscrosses Ukraine to explore Ukrainian society after the Maidan revolution as mirrored within his own large Ukrainian family. They live scattered all across the country: in Lviv, Odessa, the separatist area in Donbass, and Sevastopol on Crimea. The film is looking for reasons of the conflict after which citizens of a single country found themselves on a different sides of barricades including director’s own family. The main narrative takes place in the here and now, starting with the turning point of ex-president Victor Yanukovych’s flight to Russia. But below the main narrative there is a strong historical undercurrent, because the lives of protagonists of the film are marked by history on every step they take. This undercurrent will carry information about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict’s deep roots in centuries of close ties between the two countries.
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Bonus track

2016 | Documentary, Portrait | Director: Riho Västrik
Beer Revolution

2016 | Documentary | Director: Taavi Arus

Documentary follows the rising phenomenon of craft beer scene in Estonia throughout 2015 along with its main protagonists – brewers, sellers and variously minded consumers.

Craft beer, microbrewery, IPA, IBU, gipsy breweries, top- and post-fermentation – these are just a few keywords that for the past couple of years can be heard more and more often among serious beer enthusiasts. This prompts a fair question: “What is it all about?” „Beer Revolution“ does not provide straight answers but it does give a kaleidoscopic overview of producers, sellers and consumers of craft beers in Estonia in 2015.
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Let's Play War

2016 | Documentary | Director: Meelis Muhu

Enthusiasts of different nationalities join such clubs because of their appreciation for the memory of WW II as well as their love of the hobby of reconstructing in detail the soldiers' lifestyle of the era.

While there are less and less World War II veterans among the living, the battles of this war keep reoccurring on different battlegrounds in the Eastern territories of contemporary Europe. Young Estonian men Andrey and Reimo have gotten killed several times in these fights. Each time they resurrect, because these are the rules of the game they play along with their comrades from a military club “Frontline”. Enthusiasts of different nationalities join such clubs because of their appreciation for the memory of WW II as well as their love of the hobby of reconstructing in detail the soldiers' lifestyle of the era. SS-Untersturmführer Reimo leads the 20th division of WaffenSS, Sergeant Andrey marches in advance of the Red Army's 11th Rifle Division. The fight for history goes on.
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Red Cabaret

2016 | Documentary | Director: Manfred Vainokivi

Emotional excursion to the past of a former cabaret in Tallinn, a place full of intrigues.

Cabaret has always been place for courageous and passionate people. Passion on stage will take audience along. Some will get turned on, some will despise. Cabaret in Soviet times was against all rules. But it happened. And cabaret was hugely successful. Today only legends have remained. In documentary film “Red Cabaret” one time professionals will tell you those legends and intrigues. Take a trip to Soviet Cabaret!
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House of a Dream

2016 | Documentary | Director: Ruti Murusalu

For most people ballet is dancing. For ballet dancers this is life!

Tallinn Ballet School has been the starting point of the dancers' careers since 1946. This film puts together a joint portrait describing a dancer's life in the eyes of different generations. The young students who have only just begun their studies and the graduates preparing for their final exams are all observed by former ballet stars who today determine the fates of people in the house where they also once started their journey. Whose dream will prevail and whose will die?
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Land of Soul

2016 | Documentary | Director: Kullar Viimne, Erik Norkroos

The oldest, almost century-old Estonian church in America is about to fall apart.

In a remote countryside, six hours drive from Chicago, near Gleason village there is an alley called Estonian Church Road. At the end of this alley there stands a little wooden church and an abandoned graveyard that has probably a dozen graves next to it. This building with a broken roof and a leaning tower is the first church in America built by Estonians. It was built a hundred years ago and is desperately in need of repair. In Peedu, Tartumaa County, Tõnis Mägi receives an unexpected phone call. Jaan Karukäpp is calling from Chicago. He with other local Estonians is trying to save the old church and now he invites Tõnis to America to give a benefit concert at the church restoration work days. The aim is to raise money in order to restore the wooden church and reunite local Estonians once again as Tõnis Mägi has once managed to do with the Estonians at home, in the days of the Singing Revolution.
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Come Back Free

2016 | Documentary | Director: Ksenia Ohhapkina

A poetic documentary about life in a war torn Chechen village, with the cemetery as its symbolic focal point. The village lives and breathes in unison.

A poetic documentary about life in a war torn Chechen village, with the cemetery as its symbolic focal point. The village lives and breathes in unison. The Chechen gravediggers are always busy. Death is an everyday visitor. It does not even matter that yet another war has ended. The people live stuck in a circle of vengeance. They also gather into circles to chant prayers to God. Only the cows are grazing calmly next to the cemetery and the children are happily going about their business. The Chechens’ parting words to one another are, “May you come back free!”
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Destination To Be Happy

2016 | Documentary | Director: Kertu Köösel

This documentary tells the story of two men, Rain and Andres who are constantly on the search of self fulfilment and happiness. On their searches they have gone through many experiences which allows them to make others happy as well.The phrase giving is better than receiving was made for personalizing them.

This documentary tells the story of two men, Rain and Andres who are constantly on the search of self fulfilment and happiness. On their searches they have gone through many experiences which allows them to make others happy as well.The phrase giving is better than receiving was made for personalizing them.
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Woman and the Glacier

2016 | Documentary, Nature | Director: Audrius Stonys

A story of the fragile Woman and the eternal Glacier.

The Lithuanian scientist Aušra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tien Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with only her faithful dog and grey cat for company, she studies climate change on the Tuyuksu Glacier at an old Soviet-era research station. She loves the solitude and silence that her painstaking work brings her. Magnificent shots of her surroundings and everyday work are interspersed with archive footage of the people who preceded her by a century. Not much seems to have changed. We see dripping, melting ice in imposing caves, streams flowing through desolate mountain passes, and Revutaite’s pets, playing together almost in silence. Living with Revutaite in the solitude she has chosen for herself, the two animals only have each other. The solemn silence of the mountains is punctuated sparingly by the music of a man far, far below, playing a traditional instrument.
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Mercato

2016 | Documentary, Observation, Making of | Director: Mihkel Ulk

Documentary film “Mercato" takes the viewer into one of the world’s poorest counties, Ethiopia. In the largest open air market in Africa, we follow the most ordinary working day of 10 year old shoe shine boys, wood-carrying ladies, an arrogant messenger and a well educated tourist guide.

Abebe and Ashenafi are ordinary 10-year old boys, whose parents sent them to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to work as shoe shine boys so the family would not starve. Abtu is an orphan teenager and works as a talalaki or a messenger, but work is the least on his mind. Bertukan is a mother of three. In order to survive, she carries heavier loads of wood than she herself weighs. Mulugeta is an educated guide who, thanks to his language skills, has an higher ranking in local society. All these Ethiopians are brought together in the Africa's largest market - the endless and colorful Mercato. Documentary film “Mercato" follows the workday of five ordinary Ethiopians in one of the world's poorest country, where filming the documentary was indeed an ordeal in itself.
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Afghanistan Project

2015 | Documentary, Observation | Director: Vahur Laiapea

Vahur Laiapea has recorded Estonians' projects in Afghan and the local life.

The project of Afghan war has ended for Estonia; however, several civil missions in the field of education and training are still going on. The documentary follows the last days of three Estonian servicemen left in Afghan in Camp Bastion; the efforts of the people from Tallinn University to train the master's and doctoral students of information technology at Kabul University; the meeting between Pille Alaver, the Human Rights Adviser, and mistreated Afghan women in Kabul police station; and training midwives in the village of Dare Souf. The film forms a mosaic out of various fragments of the life in Afghanistan - an ill-fated country - where some good Estonians have decided to lend a hand.
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Instructions On How To Build A Spaceship

2015 | Documentary | Director: Madis Ligema

A film about a bunch of brainiacs, who, having seen too many sci-fi movies, start building the first Estonian student satellite Estcube to send it to outer space. They are comforted by the fact that in space technology nothing is certain and they are most likely to fail. Nothing to lose!

Instructions On How To Build A Spaceship is a film about a brainiacs who have seen too many sci-fi movies, start building the first Estonian student satellite- Estcube. Its a film about its building, launching and life after the success. Mart Noorma PhD, one of the main characters of the film, is the initiator of and the engine behind the project, or the supervisor, officially speaking. The satellite was primarily built by students, namely around 90 of them, who have been associated with the project over the years. Estcube was launched in the spring of 2013, amidst of loud media buzz; however, the process is far from finished. In fact, there’s also deeper scientific goal to ESTCube-1 satellite –the first space test of an electric solar wind sail. There’s a plan to deploy a 10-metre long hi-tech wired structure, Heytether, out of the satellite in the summer of 2014, during the flight of the student satellite. If successful, it would be the first step for future space travel. But as we know in space technology nothing is certain and failure is just behind the corner.
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Out of Fashion

2015 | Documentary | Director: Jaak Kilmi, Lennart Laberenz
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Those Who Dare – on solidarity of small nations

2015 | Documentary | Director: Ólafur Rögnvaldsson
Ash Mountains

2017 | Documentary | Director: Ivar Murd

A fairy tale about the Ash Mountains.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the population of the Ash Mountains has dropped by more than half, with no signs of growth or relief in sight. A place once known as the El Dorado of the proletariat has become synonymous with death and decay. However, legends remain: dwarves atop semi-coke mountains, exiles digging for forgiveness in pits, Mercedes-Cowboys roaming the night, and a magical bird, who must burn up to rise again.
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