Dynamics of Change in Baltic Sea Region Cinema: Industries, Institutions, and Audiences
The 10th Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference
November 13–14, 2025
Venue: Estonian Film Museum
Pirita tee 56, Tallinn, Estonia
Preliminary Programme | November 13
9:00 - 9:30 | Registration and coffee
9:30 - 9:45 | Opening of the conference
9:45 - 11:15 | Panel 1. Documentary modes and voices
Teisi Ligi: Modes of Address in Baltic New Wave Documentary
Documentary is not only a construction of images, it is also a construction of belief about reality. This belief is shaped by the film’s mode of address – that is, how it speaks to the viewer, asserts its own truth, and invites either distance or identification from the viewer. In this paper I propose a framework for analysing documentary films through constative and performative modes of address, drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. I build on theoretical insights from documentary studies – particularly the work of Bill Nichols and Stella Bruzzi – showing that while much documentary theory has rightly focused on the performative nature of the form, the question of how films guide viewer engagement with the real (stable and closed or open and evolving) has received less attention. I show that while all documentaries are performative in construction, they can invite different viewer engagements: either making the viewer accept a closed, ideologically determined reality (invoking a constative mode of address), or encouraging an open-ended, affective, and culturally situated interpretation (a performative mode of address). Through the analysis of two case study films – Aivars Freimanis’ The Coast (“Krasts”, 1963) and Almantas Grikevičius’s Time Walks Through the City (Laikas eina per miestą, 1966) – I explain how Baltic poetic documentaries simultaneously inhabited and resisted Soviet structures of meaning. In doing this, I aim to offer a different lens for understanding how documentary cinema constructs belief about reality – not only through what or how it shows, but also through how it makes the viewer experience the real.
Bio:
Teisi Ligi is a Cultural Studies PhD candidate at Tallinn University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and documentary film studies. Her work is focused on Baltic poetic documentary, film-philosophy and performativity theories, exploring how poetic documentaries engage with philosophy through style and non-verbal means.
Dita Šķēle: Manifestations of Subjectivity in the Recent Essay Films of the Latvian Television Project “Latvian Code. Latvia Today”
For more than ten years Latvian Television in cooperation with the State Culture Capital Foundation and the National Film Centre of Latvia has been implementing the project “Latvian Code. Latvia Today” – a short documentary film competition inviting authors to reflect on people, places and events of current importance in Latvian society. The project essentially maintains and develops the tradition of Latvian documentary cinema, which also includes the essay film – a conceptual presentation of an idea, thesis or critique with the active involvement of the author in the argumentation process.
The use of phone footage to emphasise intimacy in “Latvian Code. Postpartum” (2024) or the juxtaposition of image and text to give “Latvian Code. Bad Creatures” (2023) a depth of content and the status of social critique: these are just some of the many technical and formal manifestations of subjectivity, which is one of the central and most diverse features of the essay film. The concept of subjectivity consolidates the techniques of emotions, experiences and thoughts by author, resulting in a highly personal, reflective documentary with an artistically peculiar structure.
In this presentation, I will analyse the manifestations of subjectivity in the essay films produced within the project “Latvian Code. Latvia Today” in recent years by Katrīna Birkenberga, Ildze Feldsberga, Betija Zvejniece and other authors, confirming the increasingly diverse nature of Latvian documentary cinema.
Bio:
Dita Šķēle is a PhD student at the Doctoral School of the Latvian Academy of Culture, researching the dynamics and specifics of the essay film genre in Latvia. Šķēle holds a BA in Philosophy (University of Latvia) and MA in Audiovisual Arts (Latvian Academy of Culture). Her main research interest is film modernism, in the tradition of which the genre of the essay film is also rooted.
Zane Balčus: Framing the Self: Self-Portrait Documentary Film in Baltic countries
Since the restoration of independence in 1991, filmmakers from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have increasingly turned the camera toward themselves, forging a distinctive corpus of personal filmmaking that redefines authorship, memory, and national identity in the cinema of Baltic region.
Building on Alisa Lebow’s notion of first-person cinema, the analysis foregrounds how the directors stage their own presence – through voice-over, direct address, and performative enactments – to claim epistemic authority while simultaneously questioning it. Recent study of the concept of self-portraiture as relational practice in cinema (Muriel Tinel-Temple, Laura Busetta, Marlène Monteiro) further illuminates the dialogic textures of these films, where private reminiscence is constantly refracted through familial, communal, and transnational lenses.
Close readings of representative works – such as Flashback by Hercs Franks (2002), Dreaming the Path by Jokūbas Vilius Tūras (2010), and others, – reveal a cinema that inhabits the borderlands between documentary and essay film, confession and critique. Rather than offering a fixed self, these films construct the “I”, exposing the shifting, performative nature of identity.
By situating Baltic self-portraiture within current debates on first-person documentary and more boradly autobiographical film practice, this paper demonstrates how filmmakers contribute to, and complicate, global conversations about self-representation, memory politics, and the ethics of looking at – and being looked at by – one’s own camera.
Bio:
Zane Balčus, PhD, is a post-doctoral researcher at Vilnius University (Lithuania). Balčus has contributed to several books on Latvian cinema (Latvijas kino: jaunie laiki. 1990-2020 (Latvian Cinema: Recent History, 1990-2020, Riga: 2021), Rolanda Kalniņa telpa (Cinematic Space of Rolands Kalniņš, Riga: 2018), Inscenējumu realitāte. Latvijas aktierkino vēsture (Reality of Fiction. History of Latvian Fiction Film, Riga: 2011)). Balčus has an extensive experience in programming, curatorial and management fields in different organizations, she has been the director of Riga Film Museum from 2014-19. Since 2019, Balčus is a manager of the documentary film industry event Baltic Sea Docs in Riga, Latvia.
Chair: Samantha Bodamer
11:15 - 11:45 | Coffee break
11:45 - 13:15 | Panel 2. Archives, postmemory and political pasts
Kamil Lipiński: Postmemory Found Footage Documentation in the Face of "Forgetting": The Case of the Letters to Afar Project
In this paper, I aim to illustrate the specific nature of Jewish emigrants’ visits to their former local communities in interwar Poland as portrayed in the multi-screen project Letters to Afar (2013), directed by Péter Forgács with a soundtrack created by The Klezmatics.
As points of reference, I will address the issue of New York Jews returning to Poland after it regained independence, focusing on the restoration and creation of amateur found footage archives within installations that evoke the nomadism of populations, their uprooting from native lands, and their temporary return. Referring to the effects of postmemory traces, as theorized by Marianne Hirsch, these events highlight the specificity of installations presented at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in 2013 and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York.
The discussed installation draws on twelve films depicting the lives of Polish Jews during the interwar period, 1920–1939. These multi-screen projects were composed of rare home movies made by Polish Jews in the 1920s and 1930s, reassembled with a newly composed soundtrack by The Klezmatics. I will pay particular attention to the reconstruction of this exhibition at the Jewish Hevre building in Krakow in 2021, during the Kazimierz Documentary Film Festival, which I attended as a guest.
Each installation offers insights into the lives of Jewish emigrants in interwar Poland, who returned to their homeland to visit relatives, carrying portable film cameras. This collection represents a kind of visual documentation, testifying to the "travelers’" former homes during their temporary return, allowing them to bring “memories” back to their new homes in the United States. It should be noted that this kind of “travel journal” through audiovisual means became possible thanks to the production of the new Cine-Kodak in the early 1920s.
Opening a comparative space derived from the interwar era, these portable audiovisual documents were reconstructed from archival testimonies in the form of installations, accompanied by the historical film The Banner of Freedom (Sztandar Wolności, 1935), directed by Ryszard Ordyński and dedicated to the struggle for the independence of the Second Polish Republic (1905–1920), and the film adaptation of Szymon Ansky’s Yiddish play The Dybbuk (Dybuk, 1937), directed by Michał Waszyński.
In the process of archival modernization, selected clips were extracted from original films, creating reminiscences scattered between those who traveled and their return to the United States, across screens that display the same footage but at different speeds or from different angles.
Within these landmanshaften—representations of the internal lives of local communities—a nostalgic vision of emigrants is conveyed through three-screen triptychs shaped like an altar, with a central screen positioned in the gallery’s middle section. By reversing "official history," Péter Forgács, as a found footage artist, restores the histories of individuals from the 1920s and 1930s through avant-garde assemblages, filters, and solarization, thereby questioning the very foundations of cinematic language and conceptually challenging its durability, stability, and linearity.
By outlining the daily vision of people captured in films from the interwar period, Forgács develops elements of a haunting retro strategy, postproduction, and reconfiguration, which seem to exert a dominant influence on contemporary discourse. Employing strategies of "re-personalization," to use Kaja Silverman's term, and utilizing recovered sequences reminiscent of everyday Jewish community life, he repeatedly creates temporal ellipses.
This audiovisual documentation appears to gain meaning within the framework of postnational history, in the context of reflecting on the traces of past eras, population migrations, and generational legacies. The context of this reflection implies a complex analysis of strategies for documenting escape and respecting the heritage of amateur filmmakers in the face of global displacements, repatriations, and returns to places of birth.
In this project, Forgács emerges as a defender of Jewish archival materials, striving to recover and recontextualize them despite their technical imperfections. By incorporating found images into multi-screen installations, the Hungarian artist sheds new light on a discourse that multiplies and expands history across multiple screens, reviving it in the situation of "forgetting," to invoke Paul Ricoeur. This project expresses a clear awareness of the spatial and technological changes that affect the ways in which the histories of dispersed Jews living in the diaspora are narrated.
Bio
Dr. Kamil Lipiński is an assistant at the Contemporary Art Gallery Garbary 48 in Poznań. He received his PhD at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and was teaching for many years at the University of Bialystok and the University of Łódź. His first monograph. Mapowanie obrazu. Między estetyczną teorią a praktyką (eng. Image mapping. Between aesthetic theory and practice), examines the intricate relations between French philosophy, spatial turn and visual culture. He has published various pieces about aesthetics, cultural studies and audiovisual culture in SubStance. A review of theory and literary criticism, Kultura Współczesna, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, French Cultural Studies, Open Cultural Studies, Film-Philosophy, Cinéma & Cie. Runner-up in Postcolonial Studies Association/Journal of Postcolonial Writing PG Essay Prize 2019. Co-Chair of NECS Film-Philosophy Workgroup. Lipiński is currently working on the collective volume, Derrida and Film Studies (co-edited with Andrzej Marzec), for Brill Publishing House and Sensual Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy and the moving images (co-edited by Zsolt Gyenge) for Edinburgh University Press and Édouard Glissant and the transcultural archipelago of dialogues for Liverpool University Press.
Hanna Maria Aunin: Visualising the Nazi Past: Soviet Estonian Documentaries and Newsreels During the Thaw Era
Several scholars have noted an upsurge in the production of Holocaust themed films in the Soviet Union during the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Soviet Union (Gershenson 2013; Timoshkina 2014), although the Jewish nature of victimhood was not explicitly acknowledged. Similarly in Soviet Estonia, multiple documentary films and newsreel segments visualising the commemoration of Nazi-era victims were produced during this period. This shift across the USSR can be attributed to the de-Stalinization of the Thaw era, which prompted the expansion of Soviet film production and facilitated the exploration of new themes (Näripea 2012; Västrik 2017). Additionally important was the gradual emergence of Holocaust memory from complete silence (Gershenson 2013, 57–58), including the launch of war crime trials of Nazi-era perpetrators in the 1960s. Although these audiovisual materials were produced under tight ideological control and used to legitimise Soviet power in Estonia, they also played a role in producing knowledge about the Nazi crimes and shaping the early Holocaust memory in Estonia.
This presentation is interested in how Soviet Estonian audiovisual materials of the Thaw – newsreels and documentaries such as Seda ei saa andestada (1959, dir. Nikolai Dolinski, Ülo Tambek) and Kalevi-Liiva süüdistab! (1961, dir. Ülo Tambek, Vladimir Parvel) – shaped historical memory of World War II and Nazi crimes at the time of their production. The presentation explores how the production of these audiovisual materials was influenced by Soviet ideology, but also focuses on the narrative strategies and visual aspects to explore how the memory of Nazi collaborators and the Holocaust was (mis)constructed. Thus, the presentation also examines these materials in the context of the history of Holocaust representations and iconography.
Bio:
Hanna Maria Aunin is a junior researcher at Tallinn University. Her research lies at the intersection of memory and film studies, focusing on early Soviet period Estonian film heritage and Baltic memory cultures through the analysis of post-Soviet Baltic films about World War II and the Soviet era.
Rosario Napolitano & Epp Lauk: The process of Cinefication in Latvia during the Stalin Era (1940–1941 / 1944–1953)
A campaign of кинофикация (cinefication) was started in the Soviet Union in the 1920s with the aim of making cinema accessible to the public across the country. As a means of Sovietisation of culture, cinefication was introduced in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania immediately after their occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940. Based on extensive archive work and existing published sources, this article addresses the process of cinefication in Soviet Latvia during the Stalinist years (from 1940 to 1953), highlighting some key aspects such as the structural reorganisation of cinema networks according to Soviet regulations, and the production of newsreels and feature films.
Chair: Eva Näripea
13:15 - 14:30 | Lunch break
14:30 - 16:00 | Panel 3. Exhibition, festivals, policy and circulation
Arne Papenhagen & Saara Mildeberg: A Stage for the Up-and-Coming in the Baltic Sea Region
This presentation introduces the FiSH Filmfestival Rostock in Northern Germany, describes how its Baltic Sea Region (BSR) competition was established and analyses the artistic, cultural, and industry-related value this exchange has for the region, and the challenges it has faced.
FiSH Filmfestival Rostock (FiSH) is a short film festival for up-and-coming filmmakers up to the age of 26. Since 2004, it has provided a stage for young German filmmaking and since 2005, showcased filmmakers in the BSR. What makes FiSH stand out amidst other festivals which offer side programmes and activities for young people: youth is its original target group throughout the year, as filmmakers, audience, event organisers, and media education. Similar festivals can be found in Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Finland. In addition to their empowering work, these festivals have a decisive artistic, cultural, and economic impact. They attract young talents to the film industry and contribute to their professionalisation, and encourage new artistic perspectives for the cinema of tomorrow, enriching the culture of the BSR. For FiSH, connection with its neighbours in the BSR has been a crucial part of its profile. The BSR showcase was developed into a competition in 2020, and has now become an important part of the permanent festival program. Taking the collaborations and networks crucial for this international competition as a starting point, this presentation also explores the reasons why young film is celebrated in the peripheries, and why it matters for the international cinema. Highlighting also the challenges faced throughout the years, special attention will be given to the Covid-19 pandemic-related adjustments and innovation.
Bio:
Arne Papenhagen is a trained carpenter and media designer. Since 2022 he is managing director and project leader at the Institute for new Media (IfnM) in Rostock, Germany. The IfnM is an NGO that has been active in film and media education for over 30 years and has been organizing the FiSH Filmfestival since 2004. Arne was the festival director of the FiSH Festival from 2015 to 2022. From 2011 to 2015 he worked as project manager for regional and national cultural projects and from 2001 to 2011he worked as a freelance film editor and media educator.
Saara Mildeberg is a junior researcher and PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Tallinn University. She works as a freelance cultural critic and film festival maker with experiences in Estonia, Germany and Georgia.
Monika Gimbutaitė: Lithuanian Film Policy Regarding Film Theaters (1990–2001)
In the first five years after the restoration of independence, the network of cinema venues in Lithuania shrank more than seven times – a dramatic transformation that has received little academic attention. This process raises the question: how did the state film policy at the time impact the cinema theater sector? This paper, based on the analysis of archival documents and public discourse and employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, seeks to explore the key processes of both explicit and implicit film policy related to the film theater sector in Lithuania. The research focuses on the period from the year 1990 to 2001, when Film Law had yet been adopted and film policy in Lithuania remained largely unregulated. The findings suggest that the state’s policy to film theaters during this time can largely be characterized as implicit. The decision to leave cinemas under municipal jurisdiction, combined with a lack of attention from the Ministry of Culture, led to a series of 'side effects': privatization, the closure of cinemas, legal and political frameworks that indirectly restricted film theaters’ access to public funding, the absence of regulations on the salaries of cinema theater employees (unlike in other cultural institutions), and a lack of tax incentives. The sector was also affected by the absence of copyright regulation, which enabled the growth of an illegal film rental network. During the analyzed period, the Ministry of Culture’s influence in the subfield diminished significantly. Local communities and the cinemas themselves, often caught in a gray zone between art and commerce, were pushed to the margins of cultural policy. The strongest agents were municipalities, whose actions were largely shaped not by cultural, but by economic capital.
Bio:
Monika Gimbutaitė is a PhD student of Art Studies (specializing in Film Studies) at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, where she is writing a PhD thesis on film policy in Lithuania after the restoration of independence. She previously studied Politics and Media at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science in Vilnius, as well as Art Theory and History at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Currently, she also works as a lecturer at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and regularly publishes film reviews, columns, and interviews in Lithuanian media – on the news portal 15min.lt and the national broadcaster LRT. As a film curator, she worked with the European Film Forum Scanorama (2012–2015) and the Vilnius International Short Film Festival (2019–2023). From 2016 to 2020, she served as culture editor at 15min.lt, and from 2020 to 2023 she was the head of publishing house Lapas.
Karl Taul: The Exhibition of Films in Estonia, 1896–1914
My presentation would examine early film screenings in Estonia and their development.
Estonia’s film exhibition broadly mirrored global trends shaped by the initial novelty of cinema, then the fading of that novelty, and the subsequent efforts to continually discover its possibilities.
Even though the focused period is not too long, the way that films were exhibited during those years can be divided into distinct periods, that I will characterise. The period began with the introduction of film technology being presented in theaters and lecture halls and ended with the construction of large, grandiose purpose built cinemas. However, this did not happen strictly in a linear manner; but it also included films being dismissed as just another town fair activity.
The development of cinemas was closely tied to the properties of films. Just as the short clips of cinema’s early days determined the format of screenings, the increase in film length brought about a new way of thinking about what is a screening and how films should be exhibited.
Estonian cinema history also has its local context, that takes into account policies of the Russian Empire, local demographics and financial possibilities that I will highlight.
Bio:
I am a film history researcher with a focus on the development of Estonian cinemas before the Second World War. My aim is to shed light on lesser-known aspects of Estonian cinema history and to place them within a wider international framework.
I am currently completing my master’s thesis, which is a further development of my BA work ‘Estonian Cinema Network, 1920-1940’.
I also have a background in architecture studies and an interest in how spatial changes influence the values in society. Having presented ‘Estonian cinema programs 1896-1920’ at the 2014 Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference, I would be delighted to have the opportunity to share my research again.
Chair: Elīna Reitere
16:00 - 16:15 | Short day wrap and announcements
16:15 - 18:00 | Optional museum visits / informal meetings / admin time
18:30 - 22:00 | Networking event with snacks and drinks @ Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia, Endla tn 3
Programme | November 14
09:00 - 09:30 | Coffee and arrival
09:30 - 11:00 | Panel 4. Poetics, narration and imaginaries
Samantha Bodamer: Latvian Poetic Documentary and Global Networks: A Critical Transnational Reading of Laila Pakalniņa’s Spoon
This paper examines Laila Pakalniņa’s Spoon (2019) as a case study of how small national cinemas in the Baltic Sea region negotiate aesthetic continuity amid structural and economic transformation. While Pakalniņa’s earlier work has been understood through frameworks of global new waves (Bruveris, 2017), I argue that her practice must be grounded in Latvia’s specific institutional history: the collapse of Soviet-era production systems, the emergence of co-productions as economic necessity, and the reorientation of filmmaking toward European funding structures after independence (Rietuma, 2022). Spoon reflects these industrial shifts, but it also extends the poetic documentary tradition of the Riga School into new thematic and formal territories. Retaining the School’s emphasis on image over narrative and a poetics of visual metaphor (Pērkone, 2018), Spoon situates these strategies within the transnational flows of contemporary capitalism. Through long takes, mechanical repetitions, and ambient soundscapes, the film produces what Steven Shaviro terms post-cinematic affect, immersing the viewer in the sensory and temporal structures of globalized labor and consumption rather than narratively explaining them (Shaviro, 2010). Rather than simply marking a departure from national cinema or assimilation into global art film circuits, Spoon demonstrates how Latvian documentary aesthetics persist and evolve within new transnational frameworks. By mobilizing a critical transnationalist approach (Higbee & Lim, 2010), this paper highlights the ways in which Pakalniņa’s work offers a model for how small national cinemas navigate globalized cultural production while maintaining distinctive artistic identities.
Bio:
Samantha Bodamer is a PhD student in the joint Slavic and Film and Media Studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include Soviet national cinemas of the Thaw-era, Soviet and independent cinema of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the Riga School of Poetic Documentary, 20th century art cinema, and modernism in film. She received her BA in Russian and East European Studies and Film Studies from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Interdisciplinary Studies at Hunter College.
Egle Vertelytė: The use of voice-over narration in the Lithuanian feature film “Southern Chronicles”
This paper examines the innovative use of voice-over (VO) narration in the Lithuanian feature film Southern Chronicles [Pietinia Kronikas], 2024, directed by Ignas Miškinis and adapted from Rimantas Kmita’s novel. The film achieved a box office record in Lithuania (over 400,000 admissions) and won the prize for Best Baltic Film at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2024. As the film’s screenwriter and an artistic researcher, in this paper I explore how the film’s distinctive narrative strategy contributes to evolving storytelling techniques – innovative to Lithuanian storytelling tradition. The narrative centers on Rimantas, whose first-person VO is delivered in the Šiauliai dialect [a city in the North of Lithuania, with a distinct dialect]. Rimantas’s VO anchors the story. Unlike traditional VO, this narration unfolds in real-time parallel to on-screen events, merging with visuals and dialogue rather than serving as retrospective commentary. This approach creates a layered narrative, revealing Rimantas’s internal reflections and psychological states alongside his external experiences, thereby enriching his character and the film’s structure. The VO chronicles Rimantas’s transformation from a “macho-type” male masculinity figure typical to 1990s Lithuania, who is fixated on money and girls, to a young man seeing authenticity and maturity. The narration shifts from colloquial skepticism to poetic introspection, underscoring his psychological growth. The paper analyzes key scenes of the film where VO fluctuates to help condense and enhance emotional impact. The VO also shapes the film’s tone and rhythm, adding comedic irony by contrasting Rimantas’s subjective perspective with on-screen reality, and functioning as a continuous melodic element that enriches the film’s auditory texture. Drawing on Michel Chion’s and Mary Ann Doane’s ideas, I show how the VO’s sonic qualities contribute significantly to the film’s musicality, emphasized by the dialect used. This paper underscores VO’s versatility as a storytelling tool, offering new avenues for expressing subjectivity, tone, rhythm, and character development.
Bio:
Eglė Vertelytė is a Lithuanian screenwriter and film director. She holds a BA in History from Vilnius University, studied at the European Film College in Denmark, and earned an MA in Screenwriting from the UK’s National Film and Television School. She is currently a second-year PhD candidate researching voice-over narration in contemporary cinema and has taught screenwriting at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre for over seven years. In 2009, Vertelytė moved to Mongolia, where she directed her first middle-length documentary, UB Lama. The film won six international awards, screened at over 20 festivals, and was sold to broadcasters worldwide. Her feature debut, Miracle, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and went on to screen at over 50 global festivals, including six A-class festivals. It was sold to 24 territories and won four Silver Crane Awards: Best Film, Director, Writer, and Actress. Her second feature, Tasty., premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and earned eight Silver Crane nominations. Vertelytė also wrote the screenplay for Southern Chronicles, based on a well-known novel. The film became Lithuania’s highest-grossing box office hit and won the Best Baltic Film prize at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
Ilona Hongisto & Joonas Talvila: Opaque Underwater Aesthetics and The Baltic Sea
This paper explores the underwater aesthetics of documentary films about the Baltic Sea. We build on Margaret Cohen’s (2022) notion of underwater aesthetics as an amalgamation of knowledge production and fantasy to account for the specific ways in which the world’s largest body of brackish water comes to be in documentary films. Our analysis then proceeds to map how underwater aesthetics prompts narratives of belonging, mystery, and threat that impact life on land. What is at stake in this inquiry is the dynamic relationship between an epistemic quest to know what is hidden below the surface and the necessity to imagine what cannot be known first-hand. Drawing on Melody Jue (2020) and Irus Braverman’s (2020) accounts of underwater mediation, we position the world-building capacity of underwater documentaries into the framework of technological perception. Our knowledge and imagination of the undersea is dependent on technology, and hence any mediation of the undersea needs to be assessed in relation to technological affordances. In analysing the documentaries Minun mereni (My Sea, Ari Heinilä, 2024) and Matka Itämerelle (Journey to the Sea, Jouni Hiltunen, 2017), we approach the role of technology with the notions of transparency and opacity. Whereas technologically enabled knowledge production typically hinges on the transparency of images, the Baltic Sea resists such visual mediation. The relatively shallow depth and low oxygen levels of the Baltic Sea cause low visibility, making opacity a quality that marks what we can know and imagine about the body of water that is becoming ever more strategic on the global political stage. We ask how the opaque underwater aesthetics of the Baltic Sea connects to the radically changing political climate on its transnational shores.
Bio:
Ilona Hongisto is Professor of Audiovisual Culture at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She specializes in the epistemology and aesthetics of documentary film and is particularly interested in questions concerning cinematic temporality. Her most recent work addresses documentary futurity and the audiovisual mediation of underwater environments. Joonas Talvila holds an MA in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University and is in the first stages of his doctoral studies at the University of Helsinki. Talvila’s PhD project focuses on maritime industrial film concerning the Baltic Sea.
Chair: Zane Balčus
11:00 - 11:30 | Coffee break
11:30 - 13:00 | Panel 5. Methods, metadata and historiographic inquiry
Andres Kõnno, Kais Allkivi, Jaagup Kippar, Taavi Kamarik, Herman Petrov, Gendra Kotsar (Tallinn University, School of digital technologies): Creating linked data for a student film database: the case of BFM
This presentation reflects on the preliminary outcomes of the FilmEU+ subproject WIRE, which entails eight film schools across Europe. The aim of this subproject is to create a cross-referenced student film archive that a) employs linked data and b) is built on the re-use of existing metadata and the generation of new metadata. The BFM student film database consists of approximately 2,000 student films from the 1990s up to the present day, out of which around 600 are made visible in the Estonian Film Database (EFIS). There are three main categories: 1) descriptive metadata (director, actors, genre, year of production, film festivals, etc.); 2) technical metadata (video resolution, sound design, visual effects, etc.); and 3) content-based metadata (topics, tropes, visual motifs, narrative structures, etc.). We suggest that the existing metadata can be enriched with a new layer of metadata that describes potential semantic connections between all subjects and objects of the database. This could facilitate access to the archive for a) the wider public, b) university staff, students, and industry stakeholders, and c) artistic researchers. As we look at the potential outcomes of this enterprise, we discuss four aspects: 1) The analysis of film data using linked data and semantic search encourages researchers to explore new relationships and interpretations that contribute to a richer understanding of cinema as an art form. 2) Unlike keyword-based search, semantic search understands the context and relationships between terms, making it easier to find relevant information. 3) Creating knowledge graphs and/or maps of connections between films based on shared topics, directors, audiences, or historical contexts can reveal new insights. This approach offers a more intuitive understanding of data, helping to identify underlying patterns or relationships that may not be immediately evident through numerical or textual analysis. 4) The principal focus on historical characteristics of film data allows us to interpret their changes over time.
Bio:
Andres Kõnno has a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Tartu University (2015). Currently, he is a researcher and lecturer at the Baltic Film, Media, and Arts School. His areas of research include the analysis of media data, cultural data, and semiotics.
Katre Pärn: Semiotics and the history of film art in Estonia
In Estonia, as in many other countries, history of semiotics and history of cinema are intertwined in an interesting and largely forgotten way. Namely, in the end of 19th century, semiotics, as developed by French singer, composer, and music educator François Delsarte (1811–1871) and his followers, was a central tenet of the Delsarte System of Expresson that became one of the main methods of silent cinema acting.
Thus, one of the earliest mentioning of semiotics in Estonian can be found in a newspaper Postimees in April 5, 1924 reviewing the performance of I Estionian Film Studio in theatre Vanemuine, noting that their curricula included, among other subjects, semiotics and dynamics. I Estionian Film Studio was established less than year earlier, in 1923, by Balduin Kusbock (1892–1933), one of Estonian film pioneeris, and was an acting studio with an emphasis on film acting that followed the international model of acting studies popular at the time. Semiotics was taught by Kusbock himself.
In the presentation I will introduce the semiotics that was part of Delsarte System, trace the connections between the history of Delsarte System in American silent cinema and semiotics to Estonia, and introduce the wider cultural context within which Kusbock established his film studio in Estonia.
Bio
Katre Pärn works as a junior lecturer in Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu. Her research interests include cultural and film semiotics, particularily in cultural historical view.
Elīna Reitere: Epistemic Courage and Decolonisation Efforts of the Latvian Film History of the Soviet Period
At least since 2000, Latvians have defined their attitude to films made during the Soviet occupation with the euphemisms "our old, our beloved," referring to the title of film journalist Kristīne Matīsa's hugely popular book published that year on the production process of the 30 most popular films of the period. At the 9th Baltic Sea Region Film History Conference in Riga last year, I argued that thanks to the digitisation and restoration activities of the archives and the updated theoretical agendas of film scholars, films of the Soviet period constitute our new cinema (Reitere, 2025, forthcoming). Since 24 February 2022, the most urgent approach to reassessing our cultural achievements has been that of decolonising our way of thinking from Russian (Soviet) narratives. I argue that the first step in doing this with regard to Latvian films of the Soviet occupation would be to distance ourselves from the nostalgic and emotionally charged label of "our old, our beloved." However, this move requires considerable epistemic courage, which is "a virtue of the mind" (Kidd, 2018). Considering the endeavour to decolonise Latvian film history as an epistemic project, in my paper I will reflect on different kinds of epistemically courageous actions, harms, and risks faced by any actor who dares to be sceptical about whether, more than 35 years after regaining Latvia's independence, we still need to cling to the notion of "our old, our beloved" films.
Bio:
Elīna Reitere is a researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia (State Research Programme "Navigating the Latvian History of the 20th-21st Century. Social Morphogenesis, Legacies and Challenges") and deputy editor-in-chief of the Latvian film magazine kinoraksti.lv. She studied audiovisual culture, film, media, and performance studies in Riga and Mainz (Germany). She wrote her dissertation (published in 2018) on narration in slow cinema. Currently, she is developing a book project on the social history of Latvian film since 1990. Reitere has also written more than 120 theoretically dense film reviews and analyses of the film industry and interviewed art and film theorists such as Claire Bishop, Bela Tarr, Annus Epp, and others for Kino Raksti.
Chair: Sten Kauber
13:00 - 14:15 | Lunch
14:15 - 15:45 | Panel discussion. Film heritage on display: festivals, events, and archives (90 min)
Participants:
Jay Weissberg, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone), artistic director
Oliver Hanley, Bonn International Silent Film Festival, co-curator
Paulina Reizi, ACE, A Season of Classic Films, coordinator
Milja Mikkola, Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival, programme director
Moderated by Eva Näripea, Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia, director
15:45 - 16:00 | Closing remarks
19:00 - 21:30 | Cheka Commissar Miroschtschenko (1925), dir. Paul Sehnert, film Screening @ KUMU