QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The speaker is Jaan Tootsen, director of Rebel With A Bow, half commenting on, half critiquing the fact that an 80th anniversary event for Estonian cultural treasure Arvo Pärt is eclipsed in the news coverage by tabloid snaps of the country’s President, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, with his arm around his Latvian girlfriend (and future wife – his third) IIeva Kupče: “A world famous composer celebrates his big birthday. Yet the main news is the president arriving with a new companion. That’s the world we live in”. In a gesture typical of Ilves, Tootsen was recruited to become his Cultural Advisor after the President saw and admired Tootsen’s countercultural hippie commune documentary The New World (2011).

Tootsen saw Ilves through to the end of his second term in 2016 – but along the way, the opportunity to profile this unusual world leader from within the corridors of power proved too irresistible to the documentarian, with Ilves for the most part cooperating. After all, like the artist Kaido Ole who over the course of the film paints a portrait of Ilves, Tootsen is helping to construct an image of the President – and Ilves, who wears a bow tie to public engagements not just because his father once did, but also because he is aware that it makes him, and therefore Estonia, stand out at international events, is a sly master of image management. He also knows when to insist that Tootsen should stop filming.

The truth is that, despite Tootsen’s stated frustration with the state of the media, he too is finding a balance between public and private, between the political, the cultural and the domestic, as he shows his subject not just carrying out his duties as statesman, but also behind the scenes, listening to the music that he loves, working at his desk in his bathrobe and in one scene trying to find out if an opera singer is available for dating – and while the film follows Ilves promoting cybersecurity and pushing other representatives from the EU, NATO and the US to do more about Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine, Tootsen also pays attention from the start to the breakup of Ilves’ marriage to Evelin Ilves, and the evolution of his relationship with Kupče. That’s the world we live in – but it also a part of this intimate, multi-faceted, largely flattering portrait of an unconventional, ironic and affable man who led his country well and accurately forewarned, Cassandra-like, of the threat that Putin was posing to former Soviet Socialist Republics like his own now proudly independent nation.

Tootsen’s presence at the centre of politics’ backrooms also allows him to capture what is normally unseen: the endless cultural events that need to be attended (leaving Ilves with little time to reflect or unwind), the careful preparation of speeches and their delivery, the hermetic tedium of international visits. There is also a real emphasis on the large team of people working around Ilves to ensure everything runs smoothly, and there are some lovely human touches, like Ilves personally giving a ‘Presidential scrub’ to the laptop screen of singer Kerli Kõiv when she visits, or a cantankerous elderly woman and her husband being granted permission to sit in the church during ilves’ highly secure marriage ceremony. All this, as much as what Ilves himself has to say, shows an egalitarian liberal democracy at work – although when, at the end, we see the gate closing on Ilves’ Presidency, we are left to contemplate what Estonia might be losing in his departure.

Rebel with a Bow Tie premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. A fine companion piece to Marek Sulik’s Mrs President, also premieing at the event.