In the Crosswind

The night of 14 June 1941. The Soviets round up more than forty thousand people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and put them on trains. Among them are Erna, a philosophy student, her husband and their small daughter. At the station the men are separated off; the women and children are sent to Siberia. Erna stays there fifteen years: hunger, cold, forced labour, and no word of her husband. Throughout it she goes on writing to him. The way the film is told is unusual. The scenes do not move; the actors hold as frozen tableaux while the camera walks slowly among them. The only voice is Erna reading her letters. Martti Helde directs this Estonian film of eighty-six minutes, in black and white. It is built on real letters.