Kersti Uibo

Documentary film director and cameraperson Kersti Uibo was born on 22 September 1956 in Kilingi-Nõmme. In 1980 she graduated from the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow with a degree in English and German philology, in 1991 from University of London with a bachelor’s degree in history, and in 1995 from the National Film and Television School (NFTS) with a master’s degree in documentary directing. During Uibo’s studies at NFTS, the documentary directing course was run by the Italian-American Herb DiGioia, who is associated with the Direct Cinéma school of the sixties in the USA. One of the guest lecturers at NFTS was the legendary Richard Leacock.  From 1985-2015 Kersti Uibo lived and worked in London, since 2015 she has been living permanently in Tallinn. Since 1995 she has been a freelance documentary film director and film teacher.

 Kersti worked as producer of music programmes at Estonian TV from 1980-1984.  From 1990-1991 she was director of the Estonian Information Bureau, and in that capacity, she established the conditions necessary for the refounding of the Estonian Embassy in the UK after the restoration of  independance. Kersti Uibo was the curator of the first of the ‘East Meets West’ assemblies in Ebeltoft (Denmark). She has conducted master classes at the Cologne International Film School (IFS), St. Martin’s College of Art in London, the Sri Aurobindo Creative Documentary course in New Delhi, the Marina Razbeshkina film studio in Moscow and UnionDocs Collaborative Studio in New York.  From 1996-2015 Uibo was a guest lecturer at Tallinn University, from 2015-2018 at the Estonian Academy of Arts and from 2015-2022 she was teaching documentary directing at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts Institute.  Kersti Uibo’s documentaries have represented Estonia at various film days and have been screened at many international film festivals. The documentary film ‘Evaldimaa’ represented Estonia at the 1997 Baltic retrospective film programme of the Paris ‘Cinéma du Réel’, in 1998 at the Baltic Culture Days in London, and in 1999 at the Baltic retrospective of the Montreal Documentary Film Festival. The films ‘Diva in the Bath’ and ‘Evaldimaa’ were shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1996 in the ‘New Documentaries’ programme. In 2005 she presented a retrospective programme of her work as part of the Tallinn Black Nights (PÖFF) film festival.

From 2018-2020 she was a member of the board of the Estonian Cinema Association and from 2018-2022 a member of the Estonian Documentary Guild committee. Uibo has acted as curator of numerous international film events, organiser of work-shops,  a member of documentary film festival juries and has written reviews for various publications. She is the author of ‘The Times Book of Eastern Europe: the Baltic States’ (1990, 1991).

Kersti Uibo’s great-grandfather was composer, publicist and linguist Karl August Hermann and her sister is the opera singer Pille Lill.

 www.kerstiuibo.com