Veiko Õunpuu

“When I was little, I once dreamt of becoming a film director, yet it was as unreal as being an astronaut”, says Veiko Õunpuu about his earliest thoughts related to cinema.

As a matter of fact, entering Veiko’s studio in the heart of Tallinn’s old town, the first things to be noticed are his huge paintings and a significant pile of books, yet almost no signs of editing movies, except a black computer hidden in the corner. Today known as a film director, he calls himself above all a literary soul who has recently (re)turned to traditional values: being thrilled - once again and most of all - by the greatest authors of our time, such as Dante, Kafka and Dostoievsky, to name only a few. Under his calm, Nordic appearance, a veiled, rebellious passion dwells, whose aim is to discover the secrets of the human soul.

Veiko seems somewhat down-to-earth when talking about the way he got into cinema. “You always have to make your living, anyway, so why not do something you’re really interested in,“ he says, talking about his first job in the cinematic field, which dates back to 1997 when he worked as a driver for the shooting of Minu Leninid (All My Lenins) by Hardi Volmer, hoping to discover the mysteries of filmmaking. Later he started making his living with advertising, and things got real when, wishing to produce his friend’s movie, the idea of directing a film slowly came to his mind. As the usual moneyless struggling and fighting at the film studies department did not inspire him, he skipped the studies, making a big step directly to the next level: learning by practising, living through experiences. And through literature.

His first movie, Tühirand (Empty, 2006), came out of an idea for the ending of a story speaking of communication and trust-related problems in the very beginning of a relationship. Due to a lack of money, the whole idea couldn’t be realised and only the last part – the symbolic destruction of the consciousness, the emptiness, became a movie itself. The aim of the director was to create an abstraction out of a relationship, avoiding final definitions. With its lightness, humour and impressive visual composition – the sea is one of the characters of the movie – it represented a sort of alternative point of view, a certain nouvelle vague in Estonian cinema.

Veiko’s second movie, Sügisball (Autumn Ball, 2007) came as a natural continuity to the previous one, as Mati Unt, author of the two novels on which the films are based, passed away in 2005. As Veiko puts it, the film was meant to be an homage to the eminent Estonian writer. It was made with a stronger and intensive, symbolic approach to the eternal question of loneliness and the (im)possibility of love, placing it to the visual context of post-soviet urban landscape - one of the block housing areas of Tallinn, where “normal people” never live (and yet they do, finding no other better solution). The film won 6 awards, among them the Venice Horizons Award.

The Temptation of St. Tony (2009)

Considering his second movie too aesthetic and sentimental, Veiko has sought out a rougher, contrastive and natural beauty in his third movie, currently moving around at international film festivals: Püha Tõnu kiusamine (The Temptation of St. Tony, 2009) has a similar title to Flaubert’s literary masterpiece, but its content comes from contemporary society. As Autumn Ball focused on the characters’ inner existential struggles, St. Tony aims to reflect the human being in his social context, showing how it influences him and how it finally gets him, in spite of moral and ethical dilemmas. The main character is an ordinary guy - an intermediate executive manager - until the day when the world falls down on him and a Beckett-like tragicomedy begins, where beauty lies in the metaphysical sense of time between destruction and illusion, dreams and reality. The film crew just arrived from Sundance Festival and the prestigious cinema magazine Screen Daily calles the film as a “delicious black-and-white prestige product” which “more than lives up to the promise of the 2007 debut, Autumn Ball” and also says that “further festival berths seem assured”.

Talking about dreams and reality, it seems that Veiko has truly followed his unrealistic dream. And his very own temptation to live like an astronaut – flying high.

Laura Talvet