16/07/2009

Southwest Estonia is currently hosting the shoot for the third feature by acclaimed director Chris Kraus (Four Minutes [+see also:
trailer
film profile]).

The project, entitled Poll, is produced by Berlin-based sister-run company Kordes, Kordes & Kordes Film (who produced Four Minutes and were selected for Producers on the Move 2007), in co-production with Danny Krauzs for Austria’s Dor Film (The Bone Man [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) and Riina Sildos (also Producer on the Move in 2007) for Tallinn-based Estonian company Amrion.

Inspiration for the film, based on the story of his aunt, came to Kraus at a time when he was still only a screenwriter (and thus planned to find another director for the project). It recounts the scorching summer of 1914, as experienced by young, 13-year-old Oda, who arrives from Berlin with her mother to visit her father, a surgeon in Estonia, in the Poll farming estate.

While the adults are absorbed by various love affairs, Oda makes friends with a young revolutionary whom she hides, unbeknown to her parents, in order to protect him from the Tzarist Cossacks in Poll. According to the director, Poll is a personal film as well as "a parable about the madness of 20th-cetury history, which continues to have an impact on us as Europeans today".

The €7m film starring Edgar Selge, Jeanette Hain and Richy Mueller has benefited from the success of Kraus’ previous title, as Four Minutes won a prize worth €500,000 at the German Film Awards. Poll has also received backing from the BKM, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and MFG Baden-Wuerttemberg film funds, Filmfonds Wien, the Austrian Film Institute, Eurimages, Degeto and TV networks SWR, BR and Arte.

Producers spent a while searching in several northern European countries for a suitable shoot location, before deciding to create the German-Estonian Poll estate, near the Gulf of Riga. Kraus is delighted to be shooting in Estonia, for this will only make the film “more authentic".

German distribution will be managed by Piffl Medien and international sales by Bavaria Film International.

(Translated from French)