Martii Helde

A will to confront the collective trauma of an Estonian past of Soviet occupation and safeguard ancestral memory was the impetus behind In the Crosswind, the boldly innovative feature debut of 27-year-old Tallinn director Martti Helde, who is also very active in theatre. The film has been grabbing widespread attention, including the audience award at Göteborg this year, for its formal ingenuity. It tells the story of Estonian deportee Erna Tamm, whose fate represents the thousands of Baltic citizens sent to Siberia under Stalin in 1941, using frozen tableaux to capture a sense of history ripped out of joint.