>>> BELLAMORA! (Estonia)
Spring 1945 - the majority of Estonians is everything but happy about the end of the WW II. For them, it means that the Russians, who already occupied the country in the autumn 1944, will never leave. Most of the people still hope that the world will not tolerate that, they want to believe that some help must come.
Kristi is 18 by the end of the war. The war has robbed her of both parents and of a little brother, she has only a grandmother left, with whom she lives. She is bony and hungry, as most people those days, barely recovering from a lung disease. But she is a survivor, what she yet does not know herself.
Kristi joins a ballett class at the theater - there is a serious shortage of actors of all kinds after the war - and soon finds ways to enter this new world which fires her ambtion. In a while, she becomes a singer in the opera choir, even has small roles. Kristi is young, she is beautiful but so skinny that nobody would mention it, and she has really nothing to put on: no dress, no stockings, to say nothing of a hat. All that, Kristi is determined to change. The only way to make one's way up those days is to join the Communists, for Kristi it means Komsomol. A disillusioned child of wartime, she does so, although her grandmother warns her not to do that, and sure she knows herself that it is wrong.
Kristi has a short summer of success, at the price that she herself becomes a danger for the people around her, in the theater. She learns scheming, then love and when it is already too late she learns that she is not a person who could betray herself. Love is what makes her a better person, and opens her eyes.
There is another, almost equally important character in the film - Rudolf (40), a look-alike of Clark Gable, a bonvivant and ladies' man by the beginning of the film. Rudolf is a make-up artist at the theatre, who falls in love with Kristi. He starts taking care of the girl, he wants to protect her, in the end he wants to rescue her from this time and country, from herself. He has a terrible secret of his own - the KGB has forced him to make up the corpses of the people whom they have tortured to death in the cellars of the State Security, in the cases when they prefer to give them a decent burial and not to denounce them as "enemies of the people". The only way to save Kristi, from the path she has taken, and to rescue himself, Rudolf sees, is to flee to Sweden, over the sea, in the autumn when the sea is rough and the nights dark. He starts preparing for that.
Grandmothers are always right, and so is Kristi's: the only way to survive such times, even if they last your whole lifetime, is not to stick out. To be as small as you can, to hope that they will not take notice of you. But Kristi wanted the opposite, right? The last night Kristi and Rudolf spend together is the night when Rudolf is summoned to make up Kristi's corpse, after an interrogation and torturing by the State Security. The next day she is lying in an open coffin in the foyer of the theater, more beautiful than ever.
Katrin Laur
Born: 1955
An Estonian-German Director and Scriptwriter, graduated from Moscow State Film Academy (VGIK), the department of feature film and TV directing, the master class of Prof. Sergei A. Gerassimow in 1982 with M.A. diploma summa cum laude. The same year she emigrated to Germany.
While working as free lance editor of features and magazines in Bavaria TV, Katrin studied in Ludvig-Maximilians University (Munich) German language and literature. 1987 - 1994 she worked at Radio Free Europe as a journalist and senior editor. During the years 1994 – 2002 she attended EAVE Intensive Training for European Producers and several follow-up studies in dramaturgy, scriptwriting and script consulting: Frank Daniel Seminar in the group of Frank Daniel, Julian Friedman, Ken Dancyger, Keith Cunningham, Tom Schlesinger, John Vorhaus and Linda Seger Seminars, working at the same time as a free-lance author, director and script consultant.
Filmography:
2006
Ruudi (family film) – director, writer
2003
Geschlecht: Weiblich (fiction) - writer
2002
Die Lange Reise Des Reto Bantli (documentary) – writer, director
1988
Revolution From The Salon (documentary) – writer, director
1982
Three Hours Before The Train (short) – writer, director
1981
Love Letter (short) – writer, director
1979
Well Off People (short) – writer, director
Projects in production:
Quod vivis... (docudrama) – writer, director
Projects in development:
Kid And The Killer - writer
Schau Mir In Die Augen! – writer, director
Bellamora! – writer, director
