My favorite Estonian feature films

A film about the loneliness, despair and hope of six people who all live in a bleak Soviet-era apartment complex in Tallinn, Estonia.

A mid-level manager who develops an aversion to being "good" finds himself confronting the mysteries of middle-age and morality as he loses grasp of what was once his quiet life.

Police gets a call-out to a lonely hotel in the Alps. When an officer gets to the hotel everything seems to be all right. Suddenly, an avalanche cuts them out from the rest of the world, and strange things are going to happen.

An average Estonian high-schooler decides to defend his bullied classmate. This starts war between him and the informal leader of the class. As teenagers' honour is a touchy thing, everything ends in bloodshed.

Andres settles in a new farm. With rose-tinted lenses, he sets out to transform the farm into a prosperous paradise - all he needs is a healthy harvest, cooperative neighbors and a son. But, life turns out to be cruel and treacherous.

Intent on repairing a rift in their relationship, Anna and Juhan retreat to a seaside house lent to them by well-heeled friends. After witnessing an accident on rocky shore, they take in a wounded woman and her husband - a couple they find they have a lot in common with. Anna and Juhan begin to pretend they own the house, engaging their guests in a game of domination that propels their relationship to the brink of destruction.

A sensitive girl struggles with first love and bullying in a 1980's Soviet orphanage.

"Risttuules" is a very emotional, tragic movie about mass deportation to Siberia based on the memories of Erna. It all started on June 14, 1941, when trucks came for the innocent families with their children where they headed to the train station and later by animal wagons to Siberia. "How to survive hunger, cold, humiliation, losing friends and freedom, but still keep living on, when almost all hope is lost?"

A story of a man, whose sincerity becomes a great weapon in a cynical world.

A group of sleepless nerds should be taken into sanitarium for hard-therapy. They are taken to a lonely island but no sanitarium is in sight. Suddenly turns out that the nurses have kidnapped the men and are about to give them the only useful medicine they need - fresh air and work. But the patients decide to disobey. There's only one solution - to escape. The film is absolute cult in Estonia.

The story of a promising, young man with exciting career opportunities and looming marital bliss.

Semi-autobiographical story by Oskar Luts about friendship, love and life in a small Estonian country boarding school in the late 1800s.

In a poor Estonian village, a group of peasants use magic and folk remedies to survive the winter, and a young woman tries to get a young man to love her.

A small farm community is on the brink of getting swallowed by raging war. Lives of the frightened locals get shaken by the arrival of two men on the run from the mysterious, apparently vengeful Peedu.

Five people who have recently reached their middle-ages are driving through Estonia to visit a famous witch-therapist to get rid of their problems. But isn't it just weariness of life that bothers the people whose life has gone into a deep routine ? The somber-funny road movie gives a good review of life, people and daily problems in Estonia in the end of the Soviet period.

A Gestapo officer must find an enemy agent from the asylum.

Kertu s life is totally spoiled by an overbearing father, until she opens her heart to an unlikely dream lover.

The life of Raimond Valgre, an Estonian songwriter of the 1930s and the 1940s, the political changes of his land and his life after war when his songs were considered not suitable for the Soviet way of life.

With his last breath Uu's friend entrusts him with the secret of how to go to the past. Uu is an engineer and doesn't believe in miracles, but the trick works. In the past there is a pleasant, eternal summer, long hair, girls and Jenkki chewing gum. In his real life, it is autumn, his friends are bitter, the girls are married and his father is seriously ill. At the end of the day, however, Uu has to decide in which time to live his life - in the summer of the past or in the autumn of the present.

The story is about an Estonian Don Juan, who actually is a writer, who leaves home in spring and is brought home again in autumn, by his wife.

In 1950 the Soviets are trying to crush a budding resistance movement in the countryside of Estonia. A girl doesn't understand why her mother was arrested or why her father was upset when she cheered on the young pioneers as they marched.

At an ever-accelerating pace, this thriller / dark comedy tells the story of 8 very different groups whose paths cross in the space of 24 hours. We meet a wide range of characters - from spoiled rich brats to real bottom-feeding criminal scum, and everyone in-between. In the best traditions of Commedia dell'arte, the characters each have easily recognizable roles - although there are a few twists to throw the audience off and keep things fresh. The story revolves around a few odd coincidences and a ****load of bad decisions, which all result in a really messed-up Friday. It starts out innocently enough with jokes, fun and a bit of alcohol, but given the level of intellectual capacity in our leading characters, you can see the train wreck coming. And when some drugged out punks - who have a rather tenuous relationship with reality during best of days - go all Clockwork Orange on an opera loving cankerous old man, it can only end up in tears (and blood, guts and bit of rather literal toilet humour as well).

On a nice summer day a funny little car rolls over a peaceful farm yard of Muhu island. The family that withdraws from the vehicle is quite odd-looking: an overbearing madam, a henpecked stammering husband and a mystical red-head. They announce that they want to spend their vacation in the farm ... "We are from capital, we will pay". This quiet vacation turns out to be a frantic day with romance, unexpected turns and fisticuffs between suitors.