Hardi Volmer

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An adventurous tragedy about Estonia's first film maker Johannes Pääsuke and his aspirations to travel around with a film camera and find happiness. Together with a good friend, Volter, Pääsuke will spend an incredible week in Setomaa.

Love blossoms between Maroc, a singing boat refugee, and Lisa, a collector of singing seashells who dreams about love.

The main character, Helmi, is born into the house of Baron von Strandmann in Old-Town Tallinn, in 1908. The only thing that she knows for sure about her past is that her mother was an Estonian servant girl. Everything else is a discovery during a life that runs the course of a century - a life that has quite a lot of surprises in store for Helmi. In this house she finds happiness and suffering, passion and disappointment. She grows up alongside young Erik and waits for her big love to blossom. But one floor down lives projectionist Julius - a man who is far from indifferent when it comes to Helmi. All of the biggest historical events of the century leave their mark on the house. Its hardwood floors have born soldiers' gruff boots and gentleman's shiny oxfords. Its walls have held the fates of people from far and near, foreigners and locals. Helmi's home becomes a German salon, a revolution museum, and a working class commune. And as freedom comes, real estate crooks start sniffing ...

The first film in the Seto language in the world speaks about the brightest heroine of a small people, the folk singer Hilana Taarka, a woman who lived her whole life as an outcast in a small chimney-less hut; as an unmarried mother of children in poverty, begging her bread, doing odd jobs and singing. She always sang the truth, sometimes bitter, sometimes funny, sometimes cruel. She was feared, despised and coveted. Taarka sang throughout her remarkable life, throughout her fate, from a small Seto village to international fame. And she sang well. Really well. Taarka became the Mother of the Song, a legend. But as a woman, as a member of the community, the Seto people never really accepted her. Taarka - a despised woman and a worshiped singer.

An animated film compiled by David Ehrlich consisting of 27 animators from different countries all explaining themselves through their animation.

The protagonist of the film is the Bat living in an old mill and fighting rats and crows. It’s the war fought by disproportioned forces, where the battle is won by cleverness, skill and cunning. Somewhere outside the mill another war is fought.

One night there gather weird figures to the Karahundzhi Palteau. They are the figures of God created by Man in different times and cultures - puppets. At the same time in some technical center they are printing out all letter combinations in all known languages. According to Tibetan monks this act - writing down all the names of God - will bring along the end of the universe. The Creator has decided to introduce the gods to each other before the great end.

Young and active nationalist Aleksander Kesküla makes up his mind to use Lenin, the Bolsheviks' leader, in order to start a revolution in Russia with German money and create a new national state of Estonia in the north-east of Russia. For security reasons, five doubles will be found and trained for Lenin. All of them are finally sent to Russia to instigate the revolution. How will the real Lenin put up with all this?

At the end of the 1920-s the Finnish government proclaimed dry law which lasted 12 years. Estonian bootleggers living on the neighboring coast of the Gulf of Finland profited from prohibition......

A fairytale about the awkward Kohmits who frees his people from an evil spell. Based on the motifs from a Chukchee fairytale.

PRIMAVERA is a three dimensional film featuring puppets that work in the so called telescope system which tries with the help of stylised images to visually depict the great variety existing in nature, the food chain and variations in the reproduction of different living organisms. The entire film is seen through the eyes of a butterfly larva.

In the final weeks of the existence of the Soviet empire, a number of unusual films were released. In this wry Estonian comedy, a woman with an unusual talent for mimicry which eventually earns her a career on the radio between WWII and the Russian resettlement of that country (with a corresponding deportation of millions of Estonians to Siberia). In an absurd fashion, her self-generate sound effects help her get out of all sorts of scrapes with the authorities. When those fail, her incredible nonchalance succeeds. By the end of the film, it becomes clear that she has bestowed her inimitable imitative gift on her newborn son, as well.

Based on A. H. Tammsaare´s short story "The Fly, the Cockroach and the Spider" this animation weights the problem ethics in human relationships.

The Gold Spinners is a story about the birth, glory, and disappearance of a peculiar, invisible, and mighty business empire, the film studio Eesti Reklaamfilm, the only company producing commercials in the Soviet Union.

In this film, skeptical city people from the information society who are surrounded by high technology meet mythological beings from the legends of their ancestors in intriguing and comical situations.

It is a political parody film against totalitarian system of violence, about the careless game of power that has been played with the world and peoples.

Estonia in a turbulent era of change. Citizen A, a modest, indecisive person, with great difficulty and inner fear fits into the changed realities of the world around him. And he constantly finds himself in various absurd situations.

A family who, at the beginning of the story gives up the plan to buy toys, forms the frame for the film. Finally the same toys, the doll and the goose, find their way to them through the Christmas night. The toys’ journey ends with an extraordinary miracle that fits for a Christmas night.

Hardi Volmer's self-portrait to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the colorful cineast's work in the film industry. Apparently there is no other Estonian cultural figure whose life and creative process have been so thoroughly documented on film for decades.