Shorts @ PÖFF

Rao Heidmets – the Crumbler of Dichotomy

Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

Estonian surrealistic poet Andres Ehin has written – “Inside the wind there is another wind / that blows against the first one / as if through an invisible horn”. It seems those lines work with the animations created by Rao Heidmets in several ways. The confronting winds that seem to blow simultaneously in Heidmets’ work, might also derive from his elastic-spatial way of thinking, as you would expect from a puppet film marker like Heidmets. In his films, however, he is looking for answers to questions on a rather high level of abstraction. He seems to be mainly intrigued by the greatest traps of the perception of the mundane – the dichotomic world-view. With the alert sense of absurd so characteristic to Estonian animation, Heidmets sometimes manages to model reality with such detail, that such timeless masterpieces like “Theatre Papa Carlo“ (1988) and “Inherent Obligations“ (2008) are born. As a convinced surrealist he has consistently crumbled tedious dichotomies for us on his long quest of animation. May he be honoured!

Screenings

Hall 6 Coca-Cola Plaza
Screening070406 / Rao Heidmets – dihhotoomia murendaja
Screening duration

Films

Theatre Papa Carlo

Local title
Papa Carlo teater
Original title
Papa Carlo Teater
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
1988
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

A performance of a puppet theatre. But who is pulling the strings behind the scenes and moving the puppets? It turns out that it is also a puppet, and the audience consists of cardboard figures. It seems there is no real backstage figure, only the demanding ring of a phone. The whole world is a brutal and inhuman puppet theatre, where everything happens according to the certain script and mysterious instructions given by phone. Will it go on forever?

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime

Noblesse oblige

Local title
Noblesse oblige
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
1989
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

The film using both human size puppets and actors is a surreal vision of a monotonously recurring, illusory world, stuck in convention. The characters hiding behind masks and behaving with utter conventionality discover at first one straw on a coat sleeve, soon the posh and respectable room is full of straw which keeps coming. What next?

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime

Living-Room

Local title
Elutuba
Original title
Elutuba
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
1993
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

Film about conflict between young and old generations. In this animated film with live actors the protagonist is a girl, who is brought up by her grandfather. He lives in a strictly regulated world where animate as well as inanimate creatures have fixed places, which are marked by chalk on the living-room floor. Anything surpassing those borders is mercilessly scarped out of the film strip. The young girl, in whom the primal forces of nature are awakening, learns from her grandfather’s fading sexuality. She starts to scrape the filmstrip as well, to change the world according to her own will. What will she draw instead of her past childhood?

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime

Instinct

Local title
Instinkt
Original title
Instinkt
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
2003
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

What happens when the Creator loses control over his creation and it starts to obay it’s own will. Highly reccommended for close attention to everyone involved in cloning, AI creator and otherwise witty people.

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime

The Pearlman

Local title
Pärlimees
Original title
Pärlimees
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
2006
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

A smart leader can keep the culture of his nation inviolated for a long time, but he is helpless against the interchange of genes.

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime

Inherent Obligations

Local title
Kaasasündinud kohustused
Original title
Kaasasündinud kohustused
Director
Rao Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
2008
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

This film should be the artistic approach to our nearest future. We can see media to play continously more greater role in the arrangement of the social life. How we can get more precise results in the surveys? How the big and biggist companies can answer the requirements of vast consumers by changing themselves? The result of all this is a vulgar and rude “modern world”.

Director
Rao Heidmets
Runtime
Trailer

Troublemaker Tommy

Local title
Vigurivänt Volli
Original title
Vigurivänt Volli
Director
Rao Heidmets, Pauline Heidmets
Country
Estonia
Year
2021
Festival
PÖFF Shorts 2021
Programme
Shorts Panorama

There are too many people and animals at the zoo. Everybody is very pleased with the situation, especially the animals. The woods are forbidden. None of the adults dare go into the woods. The children, however, find themselves there. When it turns out no one is going to rescue them from the woods, the children won't give up, but start building a machine that would help them.

Director
Rao Heidmets, Pauline Heidmets
Runtime