Best review In the Crosswind (orig. Risttuules) [2014] | loganbennett

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Cineuropa.Org interview w. Director

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In the Crosswind (orig. Risttuules) [2014] [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]* (directed and cowritten thru Martti Helde [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]* together with Liis Nimik [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]*) is an ESTONIAN docudrama that tells the story of the first wave of the Stalin-technology mass deportations [en.Wikip] of citizens of the freshly Soviet-occupied Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia [en.Wikip] to Siberia following the signing of the then secret protocols [en.Wikip] [pl.Wikip]* of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [en.Wikip] [et.Wikip]*[pl.Wikip].*

The story based on archival materials is told through the letters/diary of a fictionalized Estonian woman named Erna (played in the film by the Estonian actress Laura Peterson [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]*).  The film played recently at the 2015 - 18th Chicago European Union Film Festival held at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago.

Erna starts offevolved the story as a 27 y/o college educated female living together with her husband Heldur (accomplished by way of Tarmo Song [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]*) who was a former Estonian military officer, and younger daughter Eliide (played with the aid of Mirt Preegel [IMDb] [CEu] [EFIS]*) on a cute apple orchard in the rolling Estonian geographical vicinity.

Her (family's) lives were forever altered when on June 14, 1941 (8 days before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union) the NKVD came, arrested the family, separated the Erna's husband from her and her daughter and sent them all along with some 10,000 other Estonians (and 30,000 others - Lithuanians, Latvians - from the Baltic States) to Siberia.  For the next 15 years (!) Erna writes her husband from her place of exile, never receiving a reply.

The fifteen years of exile are portrayed STYLISTICALLY on this way:

While THE WHOLE FILM turned into filmed in black and white, from the instant that the own family grow to be arrested taken away, EVERY SCENE WAS FILMED WITH LIVE ACTORS _FROZEN IN POSES_ DEPICTING THE SCENES DESCRIBED IN ERNA'S LETTERS / DIARY ENTRIES -- the teach station scene after they were loaded onto livestock cars to be deported to Siberia; the arrival scene in Siberia with their severa days march to the location of their exile; a scene depicting their art work camp barracks and the timber felling/lumber outdoor paintings that they were first consigned to, numerous tilling of the soil, development of the art work camp into a village (or manufacturing of a village close to the authentic work camp) once they had _clear cut_ a sufficient quantity of the timber inside the place; a Communist generation wedding ceremony scene as some of the younger exiles after a few years believing that there was no choice of cross again, frequently decided to

IN EACH CASE, THE CAMERA WOULD MEANDER through the rather complex scenes of "still" (FROZEN) "life" depicted, while Erma's voice-over would read the diary entry / letter that she was writing to her husband at the time.

The effect is haunting, intentionally so, and an expression of a description of the period of Exile that the writer director found while researching Estonia's archival records to make the film.  In a diary written by a woman, perhaps not unlike Erna of the film, she describes the experience of Exile as that of "time entering into a entirely different dimension," that is, that TIME ... STOOD ... STILL.

This was a profound film, and one of several made recently by various peoples that suffered these Soviet era deportaions.

Among the excellent films on this theme that I've reviewed here are Siberian Exile (orig. Syberiada Polska) [2013] from Poland and The Excursionist (orig. Ekskursantė) [2013] from Lithuania.

Together they tell stories of awful industrialized suffering at the hands of arrogant rulers who really didn't care about the little people that they crushed as bugs under their heels.

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