, and his memories of the late Urushadze.If you had to name one novel from Estonian literature, you name this one. It’s on all school programs. There have been many attempts to make it into a film, but no one got it made. The book is very thick, it has many characters and subplots, so it needed a lot of development. Compiling a great script out of that was not easy.
The government provided €9m across all the film projects – feature films, docs, animations. In total there were five features supported. It was allowed to be up to 90% of the total budget. We got €2.1m to make the film, and added another €500,000 ourselves. Without the competition we wouldn’t have been able to make it. The total budget was €2.6m .It was very ambitious. We shot over a year and a half because we had to wait for the seasons.
DEADLINE: You’ve been prolific producers in Estonia since 1995, how has the country’s film industry changed in that time?We are small. We usually rely on state funding and subsidies, otherwise we wouldn’t really survive in this market. It has been dependant on the amount the government can allocate for filmmaking. We started in 1995, and there was one year, 1996, when not a single feature film was made in Estonia.