Maised ihad

Father, Son and Holy Torum, by Estonian director Mark Soosaar, recounts a particularly ghastly episode in the history of the "new Russia." The film examines the fate of the Khanty people in western Siberia who have been more or less swindled out of their ancestral lands by Russian oil and gas companies.

The Christmas of 1905 in Vigala is not a peaceful holiday. The manor house has just been pillaged during the peasant's revolt; the air is full of smoke of fire and there is the premonition of inevitable punishment. Bernhard Laipmann is a tenant farmer whose wife is asking him to leave home since her husband keeps drawing the attention of the authorities. Having doubts about leaving, Laipmann is inspired by endeavouring towards freedom and equality and alarmed by the violence of the revolution.

Kihnu is a small island in the Gulf of Riga. Soosaar looks at the islanders from the point of view of an explorer, just like his filmmaking hero Robert Flaherty once did. Their traditional lifestyle unfolds in front of his camera: customary songs and rituals, and heartfelt images of people’s daily lives.

Boris Lehtlaan performs popular tunes of the time at an open-air concert.

Jaan Rahumaa, an old boat master living in Soomaa, makes a dugout canoe from an aspen tree, an irreplaceable vehicle during the spring high water.

The story of two artists - Aino Bach and Kaarel Liimand, creative and life partners. The film began with material captured for "Maised ihad". Moments from the life of one of our most famous graphic artists Aino Bach were filmed by Mark Soosaar between 1975 and 1978.

Filmic study of time by Estonian director Mark Soosaar.

The elderly couple Johann-Voldemar and Ida have found a safe haven in their home in the village of Saulepi in Pärnu County, despite the winds blowing from the sea and the creeping fog. The home yard and the entire farm entrance are bordered by a sturdy spruce hedge planted decades ago, which 93-year-old Voldemar still maintains. The hedge becomes a symbol of their long and hard-working life.

The director asks straightforward questions in a phone call to the lead architect of the district of Lasnamäe, Malle Meelak. The topics include the bureaucracy, planning and living quality in the brutalist district of panel houses. He gets surprisingly straightforward answers because Meelak doesn't know that the call is being recorded. Later, in a public interview conducted in front of the camera, Meelak's answers are quite different.

Estonia's suicide rate is one of the highest in the world. The author tries to trace the social causes of the tragic cases in the footsteps of one schoolboy's suicide.

Filmmaker Mark Soosaar talks to a remarkable gentleman Leonhard Vene (1902 - 1994), a self-educated antiquity collector thirsty for knowledge. For his whole life Leonhard has lived in a manor where he has all his life collected. Beautiful old pieces of furniture fill the hall of the manor - the old man himself puts up with puritan conditions and lives in a small kitchen. He is always smiling and looks like he comes from the previous century.

In 1986, twelve years after his film Kihnu Naine (The women of Kishnou), Mark Soosaar made this complementary documentary at the centre of which are the male inhabitants of the island. With a bitter undertone to it, Soosaar shows how, to this view, a lack of possibilities for self-government and the conceited attitude of the mainland towards the islanders have caused great problems to this society. The island has been negligently placed under far too large a kolkhoz. Enormous alcoholism is prevalent among the male population and, increasingly, among the women. Sheer possession of money has become a standard of regard. If a family cannot spare 4,000 roubles for the marriage of their children, they are ignored by the other islanders. In this dramatic as well as poetic documentary we see how the social awareness of a society has gone by the board. Merely concrete and strict reformations can improve the situation the island is in.

Documentary about seal hunters off the coast of Estonia.

A film about the wildlife preserve Vilsandi that used to be the oldest in the former Soviet Union.

It is September 17, 1991. Somewhere over Greenland, on a Finnair plane, Foreign Minister Lennart Meri is writing a speech for Arnold Rüütel, which the latter will deliver from the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York two days later. Mark Soosaar's documentary is a twin portrait of Arnold Rüütel and Lennart Meri.