Regilaul - Songs of the Ancient Sea (2011)

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
To my surprise I discovered parallels to my main topics of interest in the neighbouring country of modern Estonia. In Regilaul we encounter a powerful will to survive arising from personal, deeply rooted customs and a tradition of singing. The exploration of the revival of this culture of singing and its place in today's everyday life, which extends to the musical cycles of composer Veljo Tormis that were created on the basis of this cultural heritage of ancient songs, provides a vital and stimulating perspective of questions about cultural identity in an age in which our differences are melting away as fast as our glaciers.
Regilaul is a song form of peculiar strength. The repetitions of the eight-syllable verses and the changes are produced by the repetitions create a certain pull that leads to recognizing the inner self. The songs are not only joyful and seem to be filled with the light and vastness of the Far North, but they are also deep, mysterious and multilayered like the ancient moor landscapes thousands of years old. It is not always possible to reconstrue the knowledge concealed within these songs, not even through the intensive folkloric research conducted in Estonia. Sometimes the song texts are bizarre and make us wonder with their "different way of looking at the world", as Nietzsche described in Beyond Good and Evil concerning the philosophers of the Ural-Altaic language region. When dealing with Regilaul and its Finno-Ugric background, broader horizons open up: although the geography of its own origins is still largely undefined, historical references seem to point to a range extending even to regions far to the east.
When I began to explore this subject a world opened up to me that was challenging to enter. As described by one of the female protagonists, it resembles a treasure chest that is only to be opened with the utmost care. In Estonia folksongs are not harmless, old-fashioned relics handed down from the past; but rather they embody an abundance of rich meanings, a kind of explosive power and the wondrous ability to transform trauma and encourage the development of personal and collective identities.

Ulrike Koch was born in Birkenfeld/Nahe, Germany. She studied sinology, Japanology and ethnology at the University of Zurich as well as Chinese literature and philosophy at Beijing University/China. Her journalistic activities include writing articles and film reviews for various publications, e.g., Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Weltwoche, Positif (Paris), as well as project consulting and lecturing on China, Tibet and Buddhism. Before directing her own films she worked as casting director for The Last Emperor and Little Buddha, both by Bernardo Bertolucci; and as assistant director for Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia by Ulrike Ottinger and Urga by Nikita Mikhalkov. She lives and works as an independent filmmaker in Zollikon near Zurich.

Veljo Tormis Composer:
"Regilaul consists of verses, and each verse has eight syllables. These eight syllables correspond to a melody of eight tones. Very simple. Kui ma hakkan laulemaie: When I begin to sing. This is the nucleus of Regilaul. Regilaul flows without interruption. It rolls on and on without a pause repeating its eight-syllable structure. The eight-syllable structure is quadratic, but there are many three-syllable words. It gets interesting when you put the three-syllable words into the eight-syllable structure.
I was not so much interested in the sad and bloody events of the ballads as in the spiritual state of man, the emotional and ethical evaluation on the events which these songs imply. They represent a kind of primitive moral code and life values which hold good even today: the feelings of guilt and duty, the relations of man with other people, nature and the Universe."
http://www.regilaul-film.com/en/background.html