Smile at Last

Sixteen year old Mari, who grew up without a mother and whose father is given to drink, is placed in an orphanage and tries to run away on the very first day without success. She is a sensitive girl and finds it hard to get used to the coarse manners and rough games inside. Only in time does she begin to see the heavy stories of her companions, who have long forgotten how to cry. She falls in love for the first time as well, not with Tauri, who has appointed himself her protector, but with the rough mannered Robi. The film draws the orphanage as neither a hell nor a home and shows the hierarchy built inside it. Monika Raide plays the lead in Leida Laius’s eighty five minute Estonian film, completed in 1985.