The screening of STILL LIFE WITH WIFE by Kersti Uibo on Wednesday 26 November
26.11.2008
The screening of STILL LIFE WITH WIFE
Wednesday, 26 November at 7.30 pm
in the library of the Institut Francais,
17 Queensberry Place SW7 2DT
The director of the film Kersti Uibo will answer the questions from the audience
TICKET INFORMATION
KERSTI UIBO’s
experience ranges from being a music producer with Estonian Television
to cleaning streets in Tallinn when she was blacklisted by the Soviet regime;
from becoming director of the Estonian Information Bureu helping to set up
the post-war Estonian Embassy in the UK to being a “one-woman-band” filmmaker.
Kersti Uibo’s documentary films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
at Cinema de Reel in Paris, at international film festivals in Mumbai, Tehran, Sydney, Montreal,
Shanghai and in Europe and her films have been shown at the Baltic documentary film
retrospectives around the world.
STILL LIFE WITH WIFE
Estonia 2006. 52’
As a viewer of Uibo’s STILL LIFE WITH WIFE, you could focus on the arguments between
the couple, but that would miss the underlying issues of humanity this film raises. Uibo has
filmed an aging couple living off the endorphins produced by emotion and frustration.
Througout the film the couple wait for spring, for God, for the next day. Or at least wait for
an explanaton of their lives, filled with unachieved ideals and unfulfilled promise.
This must be a metaphor for something bigger.
In this observational documentary the mundane is not trivial. The mundane defines the couple
and defines their humanity. Are we ultimately the sum of these insignificant moments, cleaning the kitchen,
planting the vegetable patch? It is melancholic to think so, but Uibo has made me wonder. I live on the edge of a
real rather than metaphorical desert on the other side of the world, and yet I recognise this couple and maybe I
fear their complacency with their life. As humans we get so much wrong, especially relationships. This couple is no
different, their solution is to resign themselves to the constant mismatch of their lives. Off- screen there is a family
and maybe some friends. We never meet them. In the end the couple remind me of the tramps in Waiting for Godot.
Another theme worth noting that emerges from Uibo’s film is the effect that being an artist has on a human.
The poverty in middle age, the reliance on government support, the wistfulness of fame never quite achieved and
success never gained. A public servant of equal age would have a house, a car, and superannuation. Somehow these
matter at a certain age. There is purity to Uibo’s observational style that is refreshing in this age of “set-up verite”,
where situations are manufactured by the film-maker to heighten the emotion. It is surprising how powerful such
a raw film can be. Uibo has created a melancholy masterpiece. She wrote a couple of years ago having trouble
convincing broadcasters to fund her work because it lacked “entertainment sensationalism.”
I hope that is no longer an issie for the broadcasters, it certainly shouldn’t be.
Catherine Gough-Brady
 
|
