NEWS
Ballads on the Lake Marko Raat’s 8 Views of Lake Biwa was shot last summer near the Estonian-Russian border. The feature is described as a net of tragic love stories. By EFI
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he Estonian-Finnish co-production is led by Estonia’s film production company, Allfilm, partnering with Bufo from Finland. Animated segments will be handled in Hungary, making the project a first fully Finno-Ugric co-operation. The budget of the project is 1.3 million euros. The film marks writer-director Marko Raat’s fiction feature return after a decade of documentaries at a variety of international film festivals, galleries and museums, including a short film at the Venice Biennale. Raat’s previous fiction work was Snow Queen, an Estonian-Norwegian co-production. Allfilm’s Ivo Felt is delegate producer, with Dora Nedeczky also producing. Felt’s previous work include Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines, nominated for the
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ESTONIAN FILM
Academy Award and the Golden Globe, as well as Klaus Härö’s The Fencer, nominated for the Golden Globe. Recent release Truth and Justice broke all the box office records in Estonia, while Felt also worked as a local Service Producer for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. Nedeczky has produced a number of acclaimed shorts with British auteur Peter Strickland, as well as a number of experimental features in her native Hungary. Bufo’s Mark Lwoff and Misha Jaari are co-producers. Their latest productions include Aki Kaurismäki’s Berlinale Silver Bear Winner The Other Side of Hope, (co-produced with Sputnik). Bufo and Allfilm have most recently worked together on Saara Saarela’s dystopian drama Memory of Water, which was released in September 2022. According to Marko Raat, Japanese
culture as a whole exemplifies a certain type of organic and apolitical spirituality. “The Eight Views” is an Eastern artistic tradition that describes a place through eight poetic motives, such as evening glow, sails returning in the evening, autumn moon, temple bells, and wild geese departing. Lake Biwa in Japan, in particular, has inspired a long tradition of artists and authors interpreting these scenes. Through these views, we’re seeking the intersection of this animistic sense of nature and the islets of magical thought within eight intertwined tragic love stories set in the modern world. We aim to create expectations, deceive them, and distance the viewer from everyday realism,” says the director. Centering on the magical realist, coming-of-age tale of teenage protagonist, Hanake, 8 Views features a blend of Estonian-Japanese culture and imagery. The story is wrapped in a net of tragic love stories in the community, and told through the prism of the “Eight Views” art tradition, illuminating how we have all lost touch with the soulfulness of the world. The film portrays these intertwined love
