Empty Space (2016)

The director's note about the animation film “An Empty Space”

Animation film “Tühi ruum” (An Empty Space) is completed and the Estonian premiere is planned to the fall 2016. Film has already started touring on festivals, the international premiere of the film took place at
Edinburgh International Film Festival (June 15-26, 2016).

The production process of the film was carried out as planned. I am absolutely satisfied with the completed film, especially I have to mention Ragnar Möllits’ (director of photography) and Pärt Uusberg's (composer) contribution to the film. And also, the help and support by Merike Lillo (the film is based on her life story) is very essential for me.
The designer Anu-Laura Tuttelberg, animator Marili Sokk and sound designer Horret Kuus were wonderful team members whose professional input is also very highly appreciated. Collaboration with Nukufilm succeeded wonderfully and I hope to continue the collaboration in the future.

Narrator texts' in the end of the film

1. Merike met her father for the first time when she was ten years old.
2. While he was hiding from the Soviet terror during the years 1944 - 1954, Merike's father constructed a
miniature copy of his former home, hoping to one day give it to his daughter as a present.
3. “All I knew was that my father was dead. And then I got this surprise - my father suddenly appeared and gave me the doll furniture as a present! But I was also a little disappointed. The furniture was beautiful, but I was already a big girl and didn't play with dolls any more...”
Nukufilm.

In 1944, Leonhard Lina (1914–1994), a former officer of Estonian Defence Forces, went into hiding to avoid capture and imprisonment. Trapped in a small hollow in the double ceiling of a potato storage and longing for his home, he built a miniature replica of it. He crafted altogether 217 tiny pieces of furniture and household items. The doll furniture was meant as a present for his daughter, Merike, whom he’d been forced to leave only a few months after her birth. Using whatever materials he could get, Leonhard made for her a perfect copy of their former apartment. Merike was already 10 years old when she finally got her present, after Leonhard received a message that he is not being accused of anything and can come out of hiding. By that time, Leonhard had been underground for 10 years.
Empty Space invokes a past memory, an apartment that once existed, and a small girl dwelling and playing there. It presents a story forged in the dreams of the father hiding in the potato storage. Empty Space is a reconstruction of a vision on the backdrop of the anxieties of the 1950s – the aftermath of the war, the mass deportations, the forced collectivization, the ambushing of the Forest Brothers.
The sets of the film use Leonhard Lina’s original doll furniture and a puppet fashioned after Merike’s childhood photos. Empty Space draws on interviews with Leonhard Lina’s daughter Merike.
-- nukufilm --, http://www.nukufilm.ee/index.php?menyy=8&juttq=18&menyyq=sevencat&lisaks=film&keel=eng (10.02.2017).