Movies: Lennart Meri

A medieval love story with lots of adventures. The times are troubled - there's a revolt of peasants going on. To secure its safety a monastery chases for a relics of a holy Brigitte. A nobleman promises to get it if he gets beautiful Agnes as a rewa...

Most people don't think about singing when they think about revolutions. But song was the weapon of choice when, between 1986 and 1991, Estonians sought to free themselves from decades of Soviet occupation. During those years, hundreds of thousands g...

There are three children growing at Tammaru farm - one boy, Margus; and two orphan girls, Mari and Tiina. Margus' parents want him to marry Mari instead of Tiina as she is more their kind. Hotblooded Tiina is completely different from them and her mo...

The story of Balthasar Russow, an Estonian pastor from the 16th century, his life and life's work - writing The Chronicle of Livonia....

The events take place in Estonia in a summer in the 1960s. The Boy and the Girl want to go from mainland Estonia to the island of Saaremaa, but they do not have any money to buy the ticket to the ferry. They manage to hide themselves into a lorry tha...

When Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in 1985, his reform policy sparked an independence movement in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But as cries for help from the Baltic States were met with silence from the international community at large, two small...

Through four nonlinear but interconnected Finno-Ugric storylines, approximately 7,500 years ago, traces of the Kaalo meteorite – that struck the Estonian island of Saarema – left a profound mark on the peoples living along the Baltic Sea, shaping loc...

Pikk Street is one of the most important thoroughfares of Tallinn’s Old Town. The picture playfully combines hidden camera footage with more observational images, employing shots from unusual angles; these are accompanied by specific sounds and inter...

Martin Puri is an elderly fisherman who is told to retire because of his old age. When a group of people has to be saved from a boat in an autumn storm, Martin understands that one cannot act against the sea but together with it....

Sequel to the "The Waterfowl People". The author interprets the kinship, linguistic and cultural relationships of the Finno-Ugric peoples. Finns, Vepsians, Votes, Setos, Erzya-Mordvinians, Mansi, Hungarians, Sami, Nganasans, and Estonians appear in ...

"Shaman" was filmed on July the 16th, 1977 in the northernmost corner of Eurasia, on the Taymyr Peninsula, at the Avam river, concurrently with the shooting of the documentary "The Winds of the Milky Way". The Nganasan Shaman Demnime (1913-1980) w...

A three-act film-essay about memory and the historical-cultural ties of the Finno- Ugric peoples. The first chapter is dedicated to ancient Bearese of memory, such as Karelian cliff drawings, Kalevala runo song and Khanty bear feast rituals. the s...

In the same vein as Meri's other documentations, this one takes advantage of the glasnost policy to discuss the social and ecologic impact of the Russian oil industry on the natives and the lands they inhabit....

A documentary about the histoy and linguistic ties of the Finno-Ugric, and Samoyedic peoples. Speakers of the Kamassian, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Mari, and Karelian languages were filmed in their everyday settings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. T...