The Little Comrade

In Estonia under Stalin, the mother of six year old Leelo is sent to a prison camp. The last thing she says as she goes is that her daughter should be a good girl. Leelo takes it literally: if she is good enough, her mother will come back. The film shows the world of the adults only as far as the child understands it; we watch the fear, the silences and the question of who may say what to whom from that height. The account never gives the viewer anything the child does not know, and so the weight of the period arrives not through explanation but through scenes that are not understood. Helena Maria Reisner plays the lead in Moonika Siimets’s hundred minute Estonian film, completed in 2018.