Kumu Documentary: Kersti Uibo: Author’s evening
The author is interviewed by the Anglican priest Stephen Knowers about the beauty and balance of the game.
Wombstone
Estonia 2018, 17 min
Director Kersti Uibo, director of photography Pentti Keskimäki, editor Maria Aua, sound director and composer Seppo Vanhatalo, producer Ülo Pikkov, production company Silmviburlane
A cinematic meditation on being
Wombstone is best understood as the observations of an unborn or newborn child seeing the world for the first time. Is a mother’s womb the confined space that it appears to be, or is it as infinite as the cosmos itself? Is the bolder on the beach as tall as a mountain, or as tiny as a pebble? The sounds of gently breaking waves or the fluttering of an insect’s wings told the story of our roots long before human footprints were first left on Baltic beaches.
Evald’s Acre
UK and Estonia 1994, 45 min
Director Kersti Uibo, director of photography Pentti Keskimäki, editor Søren Ebbe, sound director Kersti Uibo, producer Kersti Uibo, production company National Film and Television School (ÜK)
In Estonian, with English subtitles
The story of Evald Saag, the legendary pastor of St Elizabeth’s Lutheran Congregation in Pärnu
From the Teutonic invasion of Estonia in the thirteenth century until the Soviet annexation in the twentieth, Raikküla was a clearing of free speech in the forest of foreign occupation. “A man should own a strip of land” says the farm’s owner, Evald Saag, “it makes you feel good”. Somehow, while other Estonian intellectuals were deported or murdered, Evald, like his acre of land, survived the occupation to pass on the rumour of freedom to future generations.
For the documentary film-maker and film educator Kersti Uibo, life is a form of improvisation: “It’s like playing with building blocks. Everyone has a pile of blocks, and every day you have to assemble something new from them. It doesn’t have to be a house. You can build a single wall! But in the evening, the blocks are put back under the bed.” (Excerpt from Kersti Uibo’s Night University lecture, 3 March 2018)
Kersti Uibo
On 22 September, Kersti Uibo celebrates her 70th birthday.
Her subtle, observant portraiture is a phenomenon in its own right in this documentary film.
In her unobtrusive recordings, based on a relationship of trust, she applies, time and again, a simple human touch. Time flows slowly and thoughtfully in them; the image does not merely depict a specific action or reality, but rather points, in its own way, to something that transcends it: let us call it a love of life. Her films have provided the inspiration to carry on living.
“The result draws the viewer into its spell; it is as enjoyable as a good psychological novel,” is how the film critic Lauri Kärk has described one of her most acclaimed films, Still Life with a Woman.
At Kersti Uibo’s author’s evening, one of her earliest films, Evald’s Acre, and her latest film, Wombstone, will be screened for the audience, accompanied by the director’s commentary. Evald’s Acre follows the theologian Evald Saag and his wife Emilie; this warm and heartfelt film, completed in 1994 while the author was a student at the National Film and Television School in England, also brought the director her first major accolade, the Grand Prix at the Pärnu Documentary Film Festival. Wombstone, in contrast, is a wordless meditation on roots and existence, symbolised by a boulder that arrived here thousands of years ago.
https://www.kerstiuibo.com/
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