MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA

Johannes Lõhmus introduces Andres Sööt, the living legend of Estonian documentary, whose sharp gaze has chronicled our life through good and bad, in the spins and swirls of history.

By Johannes Lõhmus Photos by Estonian Film Institute & Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia

Andres Sööt is the most prolific chronicler of Estonia’s recent history, and a living legend of documentary filmmaking, whose camera has recorded life from small islands and urban cafes in the 1960s, to the South Pole. In the 1970s, he added films to his portfolio about folkdance, Tallinn airport, and sailing. Around then, documentary portraits found their way into Sööt’s filmography, and his films about artists and simple people of the time have become priceless documents about the era. In the 1980s and 1990s, he continued portraying important cultural figures and made some chronicle docs about the collapse of the USSR that are essential to Estonian history.

All in all, he has made over 100 chronicles and 58 documentaries as a director, and a host of other notable films as cinematographer (Sööt prefers to call himself a cinematographer as well, not a director).

Andres Sööt was born on the 4th of February, 1934 in Paide, survived deportation to Siberia, learned to become a railroad worker but listened to his heart and became a filmmaker instead, graduating from the Russian State University of Cinematography VGIK in 1962. In the beginning of the 1960s, Sööt worked in many Soviet film studios as a documentary cinematographer (as a director on some films too), in 1963–1972 he was in Tallinnfilm, in 19721980 in Eesti Telefilm, and then in Tallinnfilm again, until he was made redundant in 1994 when the film studio was dissolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here is a brief account of his artistic achievements during all those years.

The Sixties

Before his directorial debut, Sööt scored his first jackpot as a cinematographer being the man behind the camera of Valeria Anderson’s magnificent cinéma vérité industrial documentary Rocky Lullaby (1964). It’s a historical piece of work, because for the first time in Soviet Estonian cinema, a documentary was made