Sugisball (2007)

It's Autumn. We see a huge sprawling conurbation of tower blocks built in the Soviet era - the neighborhood called Lasnamae. Unkempt youngsters are tossing a football around muddy squares in between buildings while yelling obscenities. Men with striped sailors shirts and blank faces are smoking on the balconies built close to accommodate their ever extending families. Women are fussing in their kitchens or hanging their washed linen out to dry. Infants in the yard hang from the iron monstrosities, once built as merry go rounds for a standardized childhood, now heaps of scrap metal waiting to bleed a nose or tear a sleeve. In between the few slim bushes lay the drunkards, twitching to the sounds of a distant siren. People wearing colorless overcoats and solemn gray faces are moving in herds to bus stations to discount supermarkets and then back again. In the evening, when the sky darkens, the windows are lit by the blue glow of television screens. Mati, a young writer, lives alone in a two bedroom apartment after his wife left him for his friend. Mati drinks, as every sane man would do in his situation, and spies jealously on his wife. Barber August Kask is an elderly bachelor with a monotone life. He cuts hair, sweeps the floors after, eats porridge and returns the bottles to the shop. He is getting attached to a little girl at the playground, but when approaching the girl is instantly accused of pedophilia intentions. The little girls mother, Laura, watches a lot of TV and turns down the men who show interest in her. Her daughters father, a devoted drunkard, makes harassing phone calls to Laura and stalks her at the gates of her workplace, a shoe factory. Architect Maurer is content with his life in Lasnamae, he perceives the lifestyle as an inevitability that accompanies progress. He is a modernist and keen on the subject of the well being of humanity. His wife on the other hand has become alienated from him and finds solace in her secret relationship with Theo the bouncer. Theo's relations to other people are slowly deteriorating. Being an autodidact with no social status and possessing at the same time an uncompromising and strong personality, make it very hard for him to adjust. Women like him but are unable or unwilling to understand him. The Autumn Ball is a film about different forms of solitude. Sometimes unbearable but mostly endurable the feelings of loneliness are strongest in such intimate proximity to other people. The film is also an attempt to poetically extrapolate or generalize on the conditions of our existence; to find from the sum of all different angles something larger than the sum itself.