Pedalling the Past

In the words of Andrey Tarkovsky, the base fabric of cinema is time, much like sound in music, colour in painting, character in performing arts. In Stairway to Heaven, the third feature by Mart Kivastik, time is very visibly in the lead role.

The characters have wrestled with the consequences of lost time in all Kivastik’s movies, but never as obviously as in Stairway to Heaven, in the shape of Ulf (Uu to his friends), played by Mait Malmsten, and his childhood nostalgia, drenched in 1970s glaring heat. Something like a parallel reality opens up in the middle of autumn in modern-day