Baltic Event Works in Progress
Aurora
Family is your fortress?
The daughter of a religious leader enters into a secret extramarital affair, which collapses her life arrangements. Years later, at a family wedding anniversary celebration, he receives a message that rips open old wounds.
Aurora, the daughter of a religious leader, travels with her husband Joonas to celebrate their wedding anniversary with their parents. At the same time, her ex-lover Lenny tries to contact her, which doesn’t go unnoticed by his husband.
The anniversary celebrations turn into a spectacle celebrating family values, with which Aurora’s father Valdek wants to create an image of the ideal family model for his followers.
In parallel, a second timeline is set in motion - the love story of Aurora and Lenny, which took place a year ago, in which Lenny draws Aurora into his twisted world.
Director's note:
Aurora isn’t an ideological film about ready solutions with clear, didactic points of view. Our goal is to observe people’s various psychological states and let the viewer decipher their different approaches. Aurora shows love as a tragic chasm between uncontrollable explosion of desire and love as an earthly, self-conscious decision. Aurora’s emotional and a moral dilemma sores her apart by those two opposing forces. One side of her stamps her feet selfishly, screaming – I want it, I want it! But her willpower limits the extent of her desire, making it clear you shouldn’t chase after what you desire or it may destroy your life, violate all the rules and cause torment to you and the people who matter to you. Estonian writer Tõnu Õnnepalu has said that we live between boredom and pain. If everything in our lives seems to be in order, with space for a career, family life and self-fulfillment, then we secretly miss the pain.
Andres Maimik is a documentary, feature and commercial film director, screenwriter and essayist, born in 1970 in Tallinn. He is a partner at the company Kuukulgur Film. Maimik has taught documentary filmmaking at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Tallinn University. In his works the comedy mixed with the tragedy of the contemporary human condition has attracted younger audiences to his works both documentaries and feature films.
Actor, screenwriter and director Rain Tolk was born in 1977 in Tallinn. In 2007, he starred in Autumn Ball, directed by Veiko Õunpu. This was the first Estonian film to reach the competition programme of the Venice Film Festival and also won the main prize in the Orizzonti programme. Together with Andres Maimik, Tolk has directed three feature-length feature films (Jan Uuspõld goes to Tartu, Cormorants, Umbkotid).
Madis Tüür is a freelance film producer. His background in public relations has led him to do numerous marketing campaigns for films among others Tangerines (2013 by Zaza Urushadze nominated for the 87th Academy Award) and The Fencer (2015 by Klaus Härö). The last film he was the co-producer of Truth and Justice (2019 by Tanel Toom) made domestically an all-time box-office record and was shortlisted for the 92nd Academy Award in the Best International film category.