EUFF 2022: On the Water

Estonia | Peeter Simm | 2020 | 106 min

Director Peeter Simm, last seen at EUFF in 2009 with his grand music biopic Georg, returns with a throwback to the late Soviet era of the 1980s. Andres, a 12-year-old living under his grandparents’ strict care, explores his small-town community with a thirst for experience. “Simm’s film stays on the same wavelength with Olavi Ruitlane’s bestseller of the same title, being simultaneously, as in the Estonian classics In the Back Yard and Spring, comical and tragic, lyrical and grotesque, tender and cruel. There are a lot of ’firsts’ here: the first willie-fiddling, the first love, the first close encounter with death, plus a number of farcical events which can only happen in the fertile conditions of the Soviet absurd … Still, it is not a story of the end of an era, but about the possibilities of staying human in an imperfect world” (Tiit Tuumalu, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival).

“Balancing gentle humour with the hard facts of life, veteran helmer Peeter Simm (Ideal Landscape, Good