Autumn Ball

Autumn Ball is the fascinating debut by the talented Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu. Together with another Estonian debut, Magnus by Kadri Kousaar, it discovered some new, young talent from this small Baltic country.
Veiko Õunpuu based his film on the contemporary novel by Mati Unt and gave it an absurdist and sadly poetic vision, which shows us the director’s background as a visual artist. The protagonists are: Mati, whose marriage goes wrong and gets lost and Theo, who works in a restaurant and ‘collects’ women – an architect, a single mother and others – all of them rather lonely.
‘When you are up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is to sing’ – why this sentence by Samuel Beckett fascinated the director Veiko Õunpuu can only fully be understood after seeing the film. When watching episodes of a few desperate people in a gloomy block of flats in their gloomy and slow everyday life, we get so very confronted with the reality of life that we can even start laughing. The black humour is an irreplaceable part of this small masterpiece. While watching the film, masters like Tarkovsky and Kaurismäki come to mind, and the director feels affinity with them as well. Rarely can a first film be so powerful. (LC)

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