Special mention award from the festival jury in the category of best artistic achievement.
The French director Karine Birgé offers a touching narrative on her grandmother’s decision to leave France for Belgium to receive medical assistance in dying at the age of 102. Using the sound traces she kept, she summons a small theatre of dolls and objects, brings together her loved ones and friends, and reweaves a world around her grandmother, who left life in strange tranquillity. An ingenious work of great poetry, embodied through animation editing, combining modesty and emotion.
Life without love can lead even a young person to suicide, let alone the elderly. Tiit was an 8th grade student at a rural school, his mother was a dairy farm worker. On Christmas Eve 1986, the boy took his own life. For the first time in the history of the Estonian judiciary, someone – in this case, the boy’s mother - was charged with driving another person to suicide.
After the film’s screening at the San Francisco Film Festival, a room full of lawyers argued about a fundamental question: does a person’s life belong to themselves or to the state? Against the backdrop of the Soviet era, opinions were divided. In the end, a compromise was reached - all parties were deemed responsible.