Madness

It is the last days of the war. A mental hospital occupies a manor house. A special unit arrives there. Their purpose is to do away with the patients. But an anonymous letter has reached the Gestapo. It says an enemy agent is hiding among the patients. The job goes to an officer named Windisch. He has a few days to find the agent. The search begins among several hundred patients. Working out who is pretending is not simple. The further the questioning goes, the more the line blurs. What the film is really about is authoritarian power. The script was first meant to take place in an invented country. The censors would not allow it. The reason was the parallel that would be drawn with the Soviet Union. The film was kept out of cinemas for close to twenty years. Jüri Järvet and Bronius Babkauskas appear in the seventy nine minute film, a Soviet production shot in Estonia that Kaljo Kiisk finished in 1969.