The Sum of Absent Days (2005)

The film tells the story of a composer whose life becomes divided between two incompatible countries, with the border separating the two at the time being total and fathomless.
He grows up and develops into a composer in Estonia, in the 1920s-1930s. It doesn’t take him long to make a major imprint on the music of his homeland. He is granted scholarships and given awards. And then, all of a sudden, he is a foreign composer in a foreign country – in Sweden. Safe and secure in his new abode, left in peace. Nobody wants to mess with his works, no one is going to arrest him. The composer finds a respectable job, albeit of a kind that back in Estonia he would have considered too trivial for somebody like himself. His family sit comfortably in the kitchen, on weekends they go walking in the parks and take photos. The composer writes symphonies which are imbued with tenderness and pain, and crafted with fiendish precision. From time to time the symphonies get performed. His capacity for work is great and his music, ever better and better, is half-secretly revered in his native land. Sweden, on the other hand, has awarded him a state stipend.
And yet…? What is balance? What is that sensation exactly? That would suffice? That could suffice? Why does the composer travel to his country of birth, thus bringing on the expatriate community’s indignation against him? Why do the symphonies gradually crumple into more and more introverted, intent, pain-frozen masses of sound – whilst the composer himself walks in an apparently mellow mood about Stockholm?
The symphonies constitute the different chapters in the film. Different layers of life, oftentimes incongruous, impacting on each other visibly or invisibly. The girls on Strandvägen, the black-and-white tones, the small cosy boat harbours, and the land behind the horizon.
The film features interviews with several musical figures of note who knew Eduard Tubin during his lifetime, e.g. Neeme Järvi, Käbi Laretei and the composer’s son, Eino Tubin.

Keywords: composer | musical work | father-son relationship | homesickness | acclimation while living abroad | conducting a choir | great minds of culture | sadness | childhood memories | memories | Soviet occupation | expatriate Estonians | refugee life without perspective | family's support | escaping to the West | biography of a grand man | post-war period | symphonic music | accusations | tragic events | rejection | anguish | loneliness | View all »