Autumn Ball

In Tallinn, six people live in concrete blocks left over from the Soviet period and none of them can reach any of the others. A young writer watches his ex-wife from a distance. A barber cannot carry his loneliness. A single mother does not trust men. An architect who has devoted himself to the good of humanity does not see his own wife. And a man working as a doorman is someone everybody likes and nobody takes seriously. Veiko Õunpuu's film is adapted from Mati Unt's novel of 1979. The architecture here is not scenery but cause: the same concrete blocks put people side by side and separate them from each other. The telling rescues none of the characters and blames nobody; black humour and hopelessness sit in the same scene. The film won the Horizons prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2007 and became one of the most talked about works in Estonian cinema.