NOVEMBER BY RAINER SARNET

NOVEMBER

Estonia, 2017, 115’

Regia / Direction: Rainer Sarnet Sceneggiatura / Screenplay: Rainer Sarnet Produttore / Producer: Katrin Kissa Coproduttore / Coproducer: Lukasz Dzieciol, Ellen Havenith Interpreti / Cast: Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik, Arvo Kukumägi, Katariin Unt, Taavi Eelmaa Fotografia / Cinematography: Mart Taniel Musica / Music: Jacaszek Montaggio / Editor: Jaroslaw Kaminski Distribuzione / Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Premi / Awards: Tribeca Film Festival 2017 – Best Foreign Language Film

In this tale of love and survival in 19th century Estonia, peasant girl Liina longs for village boy Hans, but Hans is inexplicably infatuated by the visiting German baroness that possesses all that he longs for. For Liina, winning Hans’ requited love proves incredibly complicated in this dark, harsh landscape where spirits, werewolves, plagues, and the devil himself converge, where thievry is rampant, and where souls are highly regarded, but come quite cheap. With alluring black and white cinematography, Rainer Sarnet vividly captures these motley lives as they toil to exist, but must ask if existence is worth anything if it lacks a soul?

November is set in a pagan Estonian village where werewolves, the plague, and spirits roam, Rainer Sarnet’s third feature film is a bold, twisted fairy tale about unrequited love. In NOVEMBER, the villagers’ main problem is how to survive the cold, dark winter. And, to that aim, nothing is taboo. People steal from each other, from their German manor lords, from spirits, the devil, and from Christ. They are willing to give away their souls to thieving creatures made of wood and metal called kratts, who help their masters, whose soul they purchased, steal even more. Estonian pagan legends and Christian mythologies come to a spellbinding intersection in November.

In his forty-eight years of existence, Rainer Sarnet has directed five films, lived with three women, accumulated about ten friends, passionately loved Fassbinder and directed theatre plays by Przybyszewski, Gorky, and Jelinek. He mostly writes his own scripts but usually bases them on literary classics. He is captivated by the different facets of the human soul. This was evident in his screen adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (2011). Following Dostoyevsky’s footsteps, Sarnet believes one must focus on that which upholds man and culture so that they do not become devalued and start placing value in the banal.