07/10/2010

Producer Katrin Kissa and writer-director Veiko Õunpuu’s production company Homeless Bob Production has two projects in the pipeline, starting with Rainer Sarnet’s adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

Kissa describes Sarnet’s sophomore feature, after his 2007 debut Where Souls Go, as “the story of a naive man whose direct behavior stirs in people moral unrest, rage and embarrassment over their own pettiness, making them yearn for goodness.” The Idiot will be ready in the spring of 2011 and will probably premiere in Estonia next autumn.

Kissa, who has had a close collaboration with Õunpuu since the early 2000s, is pleased with the successful festival career and Oscar and European Film Award nominations of Õunpuu’s latest film, The Temptation of St. Tony [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. The auteur/director was part of the book Take 100 published by Phaidon and presented at the recent Toronto Film Festival.

Õunpuu’s second feature after Autumn Ball [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is currently playing in Los Angeles, platformed by US distributor Olive Films.

Kissa and Õunpuu are now preparing his third film, Free Range Fred, which the producer calls an “optimistic anti-western about the possibility to attain the inscrutable and benevolent indifference towards all mundane affairs, even here, amid the pointless and sad life of contemporary Europeans”. The 2009 Estonian Producer on the Move is starting to look for co-production partners and principal photography is scheduled for spring 2012.