“But for the sake of this fierce dispute (…) this revelation was given to me (…). But what (…) may follow after this I do not wholly know (…). For when the lightning rises at the centre he looks through it, but he doubtless cannot comprehend it.” Jakob Böhme

A drastic vision of the rebirth of the Estonian Republic after fifty years of Soviet occupation: Materia prima and the dualism between East and West.

Mait Laas

A friendly, beer-bellied gentleman in boxer shorts and glasses slouches on a couch behind a big shop window in the busy historic city centre of Tallinn. He greets the puzzled, giggling passers-by, along with a simple cardboard sign in the corner of the window that says “Begging for Love”. This nice man next door is the Estonian writer Peeter Sauter. And when he writes, he’s not nice, he provokes with coarse language. He feels close to Charles Bukowski, but as an Estonian writer he’s enough of an outsider.

Sensitive, honest and delicately staged, Manfred Vainokivi encounters this man in his late fifties and in the middle of a writer’s and life crisis in his film. Sauter still sees himself as a little boy, but after a divorce his concern now is which woman could be interested in an old, fat man. He philosophises in the nude, sitting in front of the washing machine with a bottle of beer. The artistic provocateur reveals a deep romantic longing. He exposes himself to comic and irritating role-playing games to reach new horizons of experiences: sleeping on his parents’ grave, learning striptease and modelling for a racist photographer and his terrible motifs. In all his melancholy, Peeter Sauter still walks towards life: “Do you know anyone, who’s gotten anywhere just by thinking?”

André Eckardt

“The whole outward visible world with all its essence is a signification or figure of the inward spiritual world; all that is inward and what its effects are has its outward character, too.” Jakob Böhme

In the poetry of “Substantia Stellaris”, as in Dadaism and Surrealism, everything that’s dead or living in the tangible world has a signature that refers to the incomprehensible.

Mait Laas

The last cowboy has grown old. When he walks through the light broadleaf forest or sits at the kitchen table in his house he is and yet isn’t alone. Around him echo voices of memories, affects are condensed into a halting rock music sound carpet. The agile and flowing camera evokes the demon of the bottle, the demon of alcoholism that once took four friends and devastated a village. But the last cowboy survived. Someone must remain to commemorate the dead.

Lukas Foerster

Toomas, an attractive wolf who meets with many immoral offers, opens a gigolo service after losing his job. After slow beginnings, business is soon flourishing – even a film offer is not long in coming. He keeps it all to himself. And thus imitates his wife, who, instead of Yoga classes, goes to a female empowerment guru called Alexandra Horn-Eye who was suggested to her via Juutub. Their relationship gradually gains momentum.

Carolin Weidner