Passion and vitality: a week
with Estonian filmmaker Kadri
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oe Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) has come around every September for
the past 27 years. I always make the trek downtown to enjoy at least one or two films there
that I otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to see, but this year
was different, as somehow an aspect of VIFF came to my
doorstep and I was able to get an up close and personal
look at the process of how a filmmaker perfects her craft
as an artist.
Kadri Kousaar, the bestselling Estonian writer-turned-
filmmaker, is the auteur of the controversial film Magnus.
She somehow landed on my couch for the week leading
up to VIFF. Magnus, which first premiered this summer
in Europe at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes
Film Festival, has now made its way to Vancouver. Banned
in her native Estonia for the next seven years, the film tells
a story, “inspired by true events,” of Magnus, a suicidal
young man, survivor of a drug overdose who is sent to live
with his father for “paternal care.” But the problem is that
father is a drug-fueled womanizer with hardly the will or
the resources to raise his son back to health.
The film touches on existential themes, suicide and
passion. It argues that if today’s modern world can be
reduced to pure logic and mere commodity exchanges,
then civilization will go extinct. Community cannot exist
in a void and the irrationality of love must play a role in
keeping the human spirit alive. I couldn’t understand why
a passionate person like Kadri would be drawn to make
film about'a passionless person like the title character. She
- told me of the dialectical relationship between cynicism
and vitality in art. Every artist has felt world-weariness
and she believes that it is essential to creating something
compelling.
The controversy over the film ignited in Estonia as Kadri cast her good friend Mart
Laisk to play Magnus’ father. Laisk happens to be the real-life father on which the story is

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based. The mother of the real-life boy objected to the film and went out of her way to have it
banned, citing an invasion of privacy. She succeeded. I asked Kadri why she cast the boy’s
real father in the role.

“He’s my good friend. He’s loyal,” she said. “Quite
simply, I couldn’t imagine anyone else for the role, and he has
obviously a deep emotional connection to [the] situation.”

Kadri was furious when she told me the story, and her
defense of her film is compelling.

“On this woman’s precedent, no biographies should ever
be made,” she said.

Even the characters’ names, occupations and habits were
changed, and at the end of the film, a disclaimer suggests that it
was fiction.

“Who will care about this film in seven years?” she
said, sipping from her coffee cup, staring intently, almost
uncomfortably into my eyes. “I really feel bad for my producer.
He put up most of the money for this film from his savings.

We were going to recover the costs in Estonian theatres. It was
meant to be a big Estonian film; it was going to be a big deal.”

Today, the only screenings she’s had in Estonia have been
guerrilla screenings underground. One screening, she said, was
attended by 1000 people. She is, in her mind, relegated to the
festival circuit and the likelihood of finding a distributor for
Magnus is slim; and so she there is not much to do but move
on. At least now as a silver lining she has the attention of the
Estonian Film Commission, which was apprehensive about
funding Magnus, but is now likely to help finance her next film;
and this is where Canada comes into play.

More than simply a festival screening, coming to
Vancouver provided Kadri a. chance to location scout and it
was I who had the opportunity to head off with her on a trip up
the coast to show her the forest—apparently as a Canadian, I

have some innate knowledge over where the best rain forest lies. We ventured across on the
ferry to Bowen Island, as well to Lynn Canyon and up the coast on the Sea to Sky highway.