Movies: Riho Västrik

At the beginning of the 1960s, when the French pioneers of cinéma vérité set out to achieve a new realism, and when direct cinema in Québec began to vie for notice, the Baltics wit-nessed the birth of a generation of documentarists who favored a more...

Vello moved to a secluded swamp island 30 years ago. He left his career and city life to live in harmony with mother nature. Vello makes a living from beekeeping and hunting, his life flows in the same rhythm as the nature around him....

An Estonian student hiking group get caught up in a series of scary events unfolding in wintry Siberia. The unpopular group leader Olle, becomes disappointed in his companions during the trip and disappears on the last day in the mountains. His rival...

Apatity, a far-north industrial town in Russia, first came into being as a USSR concentration camp. Although its environment is at the brink of ecological disaster, the people here still believe in the state’s promise of immortality that can be gaine...

The Wind Sculpted Land is a film about Estonian nature. The nature of this Northern country might not seem anything special at a first glance, but digging deeper one can find true gems. Flooded meadows, coastline, bogs altogether with wild animals an...

A karakat is an unsinkable vehicle that every self-respecting resident of the Peipus shore assembles with his own hands. Originally intended to drive the owner to a fishing spot in the winter, today the karakat has become a unique “ice-taxi.” By obse...

A dreamlike passage through the architecture of shapes created from light and shadow. This film is a cinematographic attempt to find an invisible city that exists in parallel to Tartu....

A poetic documentary about life in a war-torn Chechen village, with the cemetery as its symbolic focal point. The village lives and breathes in unison. The Chechen gravediggers are always busy. Death is an everyday visitor. It does not even matter th...

An observational documentary by Maria Aua is about the reconstruction of the former textile factory into the Academy of Arts. The process of transformation is the result of the selfless and hard physical work of the builders....

A black and gloomy comedically stylized film about a young ice cream seller, Roob, who, almost by chance and thanks to his 'multibusinessman' boss, happens to land the leading role in an underground porno film. Though the youngsters in the lead roles...

The Lithuanian scientist Ausra Revutaite has spent 30 years in the Tian Shan mountain range in Central Asia, straddling the borders between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the autonomous Chinese region of Xinjiang. Some 3,500 meters above sea level with o...

The director, who has always been viewed as the black sheep in her family, sets out to the Belarusian town of Vitebsk to talk with her parents about previous grievances and topics that were considered taboo. The effort to find a common language, whic...

In 1982, a fire broke out in the Soviet Antarctic research station Vostok and destroyed the station's power plant. The expedition was left without light or heating right before the four-month long polar night set in, with an outside temperature of -7...

A reindeer herdsman’s life is as gently monotonous as the tundra itself. It flows in synchrony with the life of the reindeer herd from one migration to the next. The time between these two points belongs entirely to the herdsman. It’s áigi - the herd...