Once upon a time… Princess Niina lived in her castle. She was courted by three suitors: The Mentor, The Writer and The Stonemason. This is, more or less, how the film Mo Amor, a tender, modern and very timely Estonian fairy tale about love in all its forms and identity, begins. And it is about to get its world premiere at the 30th edition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF).
Writer-director Eeva Mägi (Mo Mamma, Mo Papa, The Weight of All the Beauty) and her creative collaborators present a cinematic story told by a photographer named Kaur. “Princess Niina is adored by three suitors, yet remains restless, searching for something she cannot quite name,” teases a synopsis on the PÖFF website. “Then she sheds her crown and reveals her true self. Inviting her former lovers to a secluded summer home, the stage is set for a strange reunion where memory, myth, and reality begin to intertwine, old wounds resurface, and love takes unexpected forms.”
Mo Amor gets its world premiere on Monday, Nov. 16, in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the festival. Mägi’s previous film, Mo Papa, opened Tallinn’s Critics’ Picks section last year and earned a special mention.
Mägi wrote and directed the film and produced it with Sten-Johan Lill, who also handled the cinematography. The editor was Jette Keedus. The cast features Mo Papa stars Ester Kuntu and Jarmo Reha, one of this year’s 10 rising stars in Tallinn’s Black Nights Stars showcase, as well as Tambet Tuisk, Andres Mähar, Sander Roosimägi and Ivor Mikker.
Watch a trailer for Mo Amor here.
Ahead of the film’s Tallinn world premiere, Mägi talked to THR about the inspiration for the film, how identity is used in political rhetoric and the lyrical quality of Mo Amor.
“I always have personal stories intertwined with stories that I want to tell for society or that society needs to be told,” the filmmaker shares about her inspiration for the new movie. “I had this idea about what if love actually survives the truth, since we lie so much to people we love just to pretend we’re someone else or are sometimes so afraid to reveal who we are. But then also, transgender people are facing so many obstacles, at least in Estonia, and society is still very prejudicial towards them. So I wanted to tell a universal love story, make a transgender person a hero and show a trans man’s fairy tale.”
However, Mägi also emphasizes: “Of course, there is no such thing as transgender love and ordinary love. It is all just pure love.”
The idea to tell the journey of self-discovery and transformation that Niina goes on came organically in the filmmaking process. “I thought it would be even more powerful if I told it as a fairy tale because fairy tales allow us to talk about very difficult topics in very beautiful and universal ways,” she tells THR. “And it also shows that everything is possible.”
’Mo Amor’
I had the feeling that it had to be a fairy tale because this story in our society is still being seen as a fairy tale – people don’t think it’s realistic. But I think we have to tell these fairy tales until they become part of our real life.”
Mägi loves bringing back collaborators from her past films because she shoots with a small budget and a very open process without a pre-written script that allows the creative team to explore the characters and storylines and see where the discovery process takes them. “I’ve been working with the same actors and actresses for years now,” she explains. “Both Jarmo Reha, who is Kaur, and Ester Kuntu, who’s playing Niina, were also in Mo Papa. Tambet Tuisk, who’s playing The Writer, was in two of my previous short films, and he’s also part of Mo Hunt, which is my next feature film – and Jarmo is there again, too. So, these actors and others [on the production] are already used to my method. We are all surfing on the same wave of chaos.”
Mikker is not a professional actor, so how did he end up in Mo Amor? “I met him at a bar,” the writer-director shares. “He’s my friend. He’s studying sculpture at the Estonian Arts Academy.”
Was there an option to cast a trans actor for the film? “We couldn’t find a transgender actor to play in the film because we don’t have any [in Estonia],” the writer-director explains. “So, I talked to the trans community, and they thought that it was okay if Ester, as a woman, is playing Niina and Jarmo, as a man, is playing Kaur. And we are not so much concentrating on the transition period.”
‘Mo Amor’
That was also by choice. “We didn’t want to concentrate on the transitioning period and use a lot of makeup and do all these stereotypical things that a lot of films do,” Mägi tells THR.
What Mo Amor does feature, though, is recurring photo camera sounds followed by still frames before the “action” or moving images continue. “The process itself is always guiding us,” the filmmaker emphasizes. “And when we started shooting, I realized that I wanted to have these still frames because Niina/Kaur is a photographer. I wanted to somehow make the film reflect this profession and use it as part of the cinematic storytelling.”
Mo Amor was shot over the course of 17 days at the filmmaker’s boathouse on Vilsandi Island in the Baltic Sea, Estonia’s westernmost populated island. “This place is amazing,” the creative says about the island. “It’s very cinematic. And as we didn’t have any budget, as always, I decided to basically shoot it at home.”
What can she share about her next feature, the briefly mentioned Mo Hunt? “We are in post- production at the moment,” she says.
And just like Mo Papa and Mo Amor are very different in terms of look, feel and atmosphere, Mo Hunt will also be a different kind of experience. “The visual language is different,” Mägi tells THR. “It’s a hybrid film, a staged documentary. I don’t want to repeat myself. And it’s also the outcome of the fact that we don’t have everything planned. We really go into the process and let the story guide us. And I guess every story has its unique ways of being reflected.”
Eeva Mägi
The original idea for Mo Hunt was to tell the story of a ballerina who becomes an illegal surrogate. “We started staging this ballerina, and then I had a feeling that I had to collect stories from different artists about how they have experienced the thin line between artistic creation and manipulation,” the director recalls. “Artistic creation can become exploitation or mental abuse. I was wondering how far I can push actors just for the sake of art. I understood that there are boundaries, there are limits. So, then I started to get interested in this topic and started collecting different stories from different artists.”
That is why Mo Hunt will be “a staged documentary.” Explains Mägi: “All the people in the film are playing actors, but they are presenting the stories of different artists. So, the film combines what’s happening in the fiction film with what’s actually happening in artists’ hearts and minds.”