In the Crosswind

In the summer of 1941, Joseph Stalin had tens of thousands of people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania expelled from their homes. Men were sent to prison camps without trial, while women and children were deported to Siberia. The aim of this operation by the Soviet dictator was the “ethnic cleansing” of the Baltic states. Only a few were to return - one of them was the Estonian Erna Tamm, a happily married mother of a young daughter. Martti Herode's film follows her memories, written in letters and diary entries - and finds an incomparably impressive cinematic language for it: in minute-long plan sequences, the many small tableau vivant moments, in which the camera glides through the figures frozen as if in photographs, combine to form a large fresco of “living images”. Extremely artistic and, on the other hand, very touching, “In the Crosswind” succeeds in telling of the tearing down of an idyll and the tearing apart of a family. For Erna, time takes on a different dimension during the inhuman hardships. For the viewer, the illustrated contemporary history becomes unbelievably vivid, especially in its torpor. What an impressive journey through time and what a cinematic discovery worth embarking on. “It took almost four years to make the film. It took two to six months to prepare each of these tableau vivant frescoes (in scope format), which were then shot in one day. Mass scenes with more than three hundred people who were not allowed to move and had to freeze in precise postures. The only thing in constant motion is the camera, which glides through this gigantic sculpture park according to a sophisticated choreography. [...] The aesthetics of the film emerge from the subjectivity of their feelings. Time stands still in the years of captivity. The body freezes in the cold of the foreign land, while the soul, separated from the body, remains completely lost, waiting, back home. This is the core metaphor from which the film - like a requiem - unfolds its elegiac poetry. The constant slow-motion pace of the camera, often moving to the left, accompanied by the woman's voice; all in black and white throughout. [...] Martti Heldes feature film debut was one of the great discoveries of the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival. A film that one wishes would find its way into the cinemas.” (Peter Kremski, on: filmbulletin.ch)