Spring

A winter passes at the parish school in the Estonian village of Paunvere, at the end of the nineteenth century. When Arno gets to the schoolhouse with his father, lessons have already begun; that is the best known sentence in Estonian literature. The first love Arno feels for Teele is never said out loud, Toots smuggles a prank into every lesson, Kiir does his calculations, and Tõnisson is quietly the strongest of them. Arvo Kruusement's adaptation of Oskar Luts's novel is a classic handed down from one Estonian generation to the next. It does not prettify childhood; the hierarchy inside the classroom, the small cruelties and the reconciliations are all left as they are. Snow, the wooden schoolhouse and the frozen lake carry as much of the feeling as the plot does. The director followed the same children through two more films in the years that came after.