About

ESTONIAN FILM INSTITUTE (EFI)

is a national foundation, financed mainly by the Ministry of Culture. EFI’s professional sphere reaches the whole field of film. The institute is broadly divided into three departments: development and marketing, production, and heritage. EFI supports development, production, and distribution of films, promotes Estonian films both domestically and abroad, provides information about Estonian film industry and film heritage, establishes, and develops international contacts. EFI’s Film Heritage Department manages all the films made in the legendary Tallinnfilm studio in the years 1941–2001. As it was the only film studio in Soviet Estonia, it forms a considerable majority of the country’s film production during this period, including the biggest national hits like The Spring and The Last Relic. There are approximately 850 films on the list, not to mention countless newsreels.

The main responsibility is to ensure that these films are well preserved and to the highest standard. Today, the department works in close cooperation with the Estonian Film Archive in terms of film heritage digitization and organization of the public procurements to the restoration process. Working on the development and comprehensibility of film competence as a medium, it is based on a wide progressive domestic and foreign network and various cooperation projects, through which film competence methodologies are developed.

The Estonian Ministry of Culture has completed an action plan for the digitization of Estonia’s cultural heritage. The objective of the action plan is to make a third of the cultural heritage stored in our memory institutions available digitally by 2023. In cooperation with Film Archive and the National Archives of Estonia 50% of Tallinnfilms’ film heritage is now digitalized.

FILM ARCHIVE, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF ESTONIA

The collections of the Film Archive include film and video material on Estonia from the early 20th century to the present. Organised acquisition of films started in 1935 on the basis of the Archives Act and focused on newsreels. The earliest film footage dates back to 1908. The oldest domestic films were produced by Johannes Pääsuke between 1912 and 1914.

The Film Archive holds newsreels, newsreel segments, documentaries, music films, feature films, animated films, advertisements and amateur films. The archives are the repository for more than 8000 titles of film and close to 7000 original video titles. The collections also include outtakes from television programmes and films, fragments of films that have not survived in their entirety, and other additional materials such as film postproduction transcripts, screenplays and posters.

As of April 2021, the Film Archive is a member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).