Lioness

Helena is a 48-year-old paramedic. A strong and efficient woman who has no difficulty handling the practical details of everyday life. But the fact that she has emotionally abandoned her daughter a long time ago remains invisible to her. This autumn, the smart but lonely 15-year-old Stefi shaves her head, stops going to school, doesn't come home at nights, and becomes a member of a violent youth gang. When the girl ends up in hospital after a serious overdose, a desperate, crazy plan forms in Helena’s mind. She plans to secretly kidnap Stefi and lock her up in the family’s old summerhouse. But Stefi goes missing from the hospital and Helena gets trapped in the delicate balance between sanity and madness. On one hand, she participates in all the efforts by the police, the media, and her husband Kaarel to find Stefi. On the other hand, she leads a secret imaginary life in the summerhouse, where, hidden from the reality, the mother and daughter rediscover the love they once had.

Director’s note:
Extreme situations in parent-child relationships create a lot of vital questions in most of us. In me, they trigger imagination and force me to look for answers through writing a story.
Lioness started with a news article about a desperate mother spending all her nights searching for her repeatedly missing child. And a line she kept saying like a refrain – I’m not allowed to just lock her up although I know I should!
A film allows you to play through that scenario of what happens when you do the thing you are not allowed to do. In a film, you can also follow through with the idea of how is it possible to stay sane when your child is missing? Our main character Helena lets her imagination comfort her. In her heart and mind, she does everything she did not do or say in real life. Locking her daughter up in a dark nest-like place and symbolically chaining her to herself is a return to the beginning, to the womb.
Everybody, even those who have failed the most, deserves a second chance.

Director's bio:

Liina Triškina-Vanhatalo started her film studies in 1998 at the European Film College in Denmark, followed by the Film School of Catalonia at Barcelona University.

Since then, she has worked on tens of documentaries, as director and editor. She has also taught editing at the Baltic Film and Media School. Parallel to documentaries, she started to work as script-continuity for fiction features.

In 2016, she completed her second screenplay, the social drama Take It or Leave It. The film premiered in October 2018 at Warsaw IFF, won prizes at Cottbus IFF and Arras IFF. It was selected as Estonian submission for Best Foreign Film at Academy Award and was a nominee for the Best Screenplay at the Estonian Film and Television Awards 2019.

Producer's bio:

Producer and Sound Designer Ivo Felt co-founded the production company Allfilm in 1995. Currently, Ivo is focusing more on producing but has created sound design for more than 50 feature and documentary films in the past.

Ivo’s productions include Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines, nominated for the Academy Award and the Golden Globe, as well as Klaus Härö’s The Fencer, nominated for the Golden Globe.

Ivo’s latest feature film Truth and Justice, directed by Tanel Toom, broke all the box office records locally, won a Satellite Award, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award.

In 2019, Ivo worked as a local Service Producer for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.

Company profile:

Allfilm is an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominated production house operating since 1995.

The company was created as a collaborative environment where exciting and original ideas could be matched with highly professional management. With considerable experience in film development and production, Allfilm is a vibrant production company with several full-time producers on board.

Our scope of activity varies from developing and producing quality features, documentaries, and TV series. We also come onboard as a co-production partner and provide production services under the Film Estonia cash rebate scheme.

The films produced by Allfilm have won numerous awards at international film festivals and been distributed in more than 120 countries worldwide.