Baltic Film, Media and Arts School

Marianne Ostrat

Marianne Ostrat, a Tallinn-based Estonian film producer and founder of Alexandra Film and Fork Film Animation Studio, is active in the field of fiction, documentary and animation. In 2009 she graduated from the Baltic Film and Media School international Film Arts MA program and in 2013 from the EAVE European Producers Workshop. Her debut fiction feature The End of the Chain premiered at the Karlovy Vary IFF in 2017 and garnered four nominations at Estonian Film & TV Awards. Marianne co-produced a Spanish-Estonian feature documentary Constructing Albert (2017, San Sebastian, HotDocs, SXSW, Palm Springs) and a Swedish-Estonian animated short Amalimbo (2016), that premiered at the Venice IFF and was nominated for a European Film Award. In July 2021 Marianne released her second fiction feature - a youth comedy Kids of the Night. Marianne is a member and former board member of the Estonian Film Industry Cluster and with her upcoming feature documentary - an Estonian-French-Icelandic co-production Smoke Sauna Sisterhood - is a Sundance Institute Documentary Program Grantee.

Elen Lotman

Elen Lotman is a cinematographer, lecturer and researcher. She has shot numerous documentaries, short and feature films. For various film projects she has travelled to Japan, Tibet, China, Thailand, India, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Lapland and Russian Arctic. Her films have won awards and have been shown in competition programs of A-class film festivals like IDFA, Tampere Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival etc. In addition to being a cinematographer she has served as Head of Film Department in Baltic Film and Media school. During her PhD studies she conducted neurocinematic research on how cinematography affects viewer's empathy towards the onscreen characters and she currently serves in BFM as the head of creative research track. Recently, films she has shot have won numerous awards and accolades. Full-length documentary 'Dear Mother' was in Official selection of Tampere Film Festival National Competition Programme and was nominated for Best Cinematography at the Reel Heart Filmfestival in Toronto, won the Best Feature Documentary at the Reel Heart Filmfestival in Toronto, Estonian People´s Award at Pärnu Film Festival, LOOK AT ME Award at the 39th Oulu International Children and Youth Film Festival and special mention in the Taormina film festival. Full-length fiction 'Good Bye Soviet Union' won the Black Nights Film Festival audience award, Best Screenplay in Estonian Film and TV Awards and was selected to multiple competition programmes, among others A-list festivals Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and Moscow International Film Festival. Full-length fiction Sleeping Beast won the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Just Film Works in Progress award. Her feature film screenplay 'Container' made it to quarterfinalist in a historically tight competition of 8191 submitted scripts at the American Film Academy Nicholl Fellowship international screenwriting competition. Her virtual exhibitions filmed for Tallinn Art Hall were chosen among best virtual exhibitions of 2020 by both New York Times and Wallpaper Magazine.

She also serves as co-president of IMAGO, International Federation of Cinematographers, an organization that unites 5000+ cinematographers from all over the world.

Harmo Kallaste

Born in 1972, Harmo has been working as a sound designer and re-recording mixer for more than 20 years. His list of credits include more than one hundred projects, starting from domestic TV programs and shorts up to nominated feature films and documentaries. His filmography also includes the Estonian film "Tangerines" which was nominated as the "Best Foreign Language" film in both the Golden Globe and Academy Awards in 2015 and the film "Putting Lipstick on a Pig" which won the best documentary award in Warsaw International Film Festival in 2018. Harmo has also been working as a music producer and musician and has composed for commercials, audio-visuals, TV and film.

Mart Raun

Cinematographer, visiting lecturer, screenwriter and illustrator Mart Raun studied directing and cinematography in Tallinn university Baltic Film and Media School. From 2005 he started working as illustrator and freelance storyboard artist for local and international commercials. He also did storyboards for feature films "Georg" (2007) (2007) and "Kill The Child" (2022) (2022).

As a big film lover, he started writing reviews for online space in 2012 and also worked as a weekly film critic for "Äripäev", one of the most successful economic newspapers in Europe.

After graduating from film school he worked for a few years as a Camera Assistant and gaffer/electrician before becoming a full time cinematographer. He has been shooting commercials, TV, fiction and documentaries. Feature Films as cinematographer: "Cormorans" (2011) and "Kids of The Night" (2021), where he also shares co-writing credit.

Since 2015 he has been working in Tallinn university with international programs. Besides KinoEyes he was also course director and teacher of Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters programme "Viewfinder". Currently he is also the head and visiting lecturer of Audiovisual Media BA program at BFM.

Liis Nimik

Liis Nimik is a documentary filmmaker, fiction editor, lecturer and an editing philosopher. She graduated from Baltic Film and Media School - BA in Film Art in 2012 as an editor and MA in 2015 as a documentary filmmaker. Liis has been an active member of the filmmaking community in Estonia and abroad since 2010. She has edited 4 feature films and worked together with the renowned director Veiko Õunpuu in two feature films - "Free Range" (2013) and "Roukli" (2015). She has also edited the widely distributed festival hit "In the Crosswind" (2014), being also one of the authors of the original idea. Liis Nimik is currently producing documentaries and finishing her first feature doc as a director. The recent films she produced - "Lembri Uudu" (2017), "The Weight of All the Beauty" (2019) and "A Loss of Something Ever Felt" (2020) have all been international festival successes, having being premiered, shown and awarded in festivals like DocLeipzig, Sarajevo, HotDocs, Melbourne IFF, Jihlava and Black Nights. "The Weight of all the Beauty" participated in the Oscar competition for short docs in 2021. Liis believes curiosity and humor are the two most important components of life and keeps researching the magic of film through this perspective.

Jarmo Valkola

Jarmo Valkola is Doctor of Philosophy. His dissertation is from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Department of Art Education, entitled Perceiving the Visual in Cinema; Semantic Approaches to Film Form and Meaning (1993). http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-7891-4 His opponent was Professor Raymond Durgnat, University of East-London. He has lifetime nominations as Docent at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland (Motion Pictures, TV and Production Design), Docent Professor at the University of Lapland, Finland (Media Science), and Docent at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (Art Education). During the last 15 years, he has worked as Professor (Innove, film theory), Associate Professor of Film History and Theory, and visiting academic supervisor of thesis-work at Baltic Film, Media, Art and Communication Institute of Tallinn University, Estonia. Previously he has worked as Professor of Art Education at the University of Jyväskylä, as Associate Professor of Media Education at the University of Lapland, and as Invited Professor at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University's Doctoral School - Chaire Roger Odin: Cinéma et audiovisuel, Paris 3 - (2014). He has made numerous visiting professor visits to Aegean Sea University, University of Vienna, University of Padova, Pécs University, University of Debrecen, Famu, the Prague Film School, RITS Film School/Erasmus University of Brussels, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, East-London University, University of Warsaw, University of Groningen, Tartu University, Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava, Constantine, the Philosopher University in Nitra, and Université de Caen/Basse Normandie. He acted as Special Researcher in the Cult, Community and Identity Research Project, Academy of Finland, Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, 2006-8. He has written 18 books and 60 scientific articles on cinema, art, and aesthetics. His books and articles have appeared in various languages: Finnish, English, French, Italian, German, Turkish, Greek, Estonian and Hungarian. Among his books are Cognition and Visuality (2004), Landscapes of the Mind: Emotion and Style in Aki Kaurismäki's Films (2012), Thoughts on Images (2012), Filmi: Audiovisuaalne Keel (2015), and Pictorialism in Cinema: Creating New Narrative Challenges. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-4438-9762-4 His last book is called The Audiovisual Mode of Orchestration: Cognitive Analysis of Cinema (Lambert Academic Publishing 2021). https://www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details//store/gb/book/978-620-3-58074-7/the-audiovisual-mode-of-orchestration He is currently doing research on hypermodern documentary discourse. He has worked as an advisor in The Society for Phenomenology and Media (2011-), and Quest Curator for Filmatique – New York based net journal - https://filmatique.uscreen.io/. He has made documentaries on Japanese cinema (Nagisa Oshima), Indian cinema (Shyam Benegal) and British cinema. In 2021, he was elected as the First Honorary Member of Baltic Film, Media and Arts School of Tallinn University.

Kaur Kokk

Kaur Kokk (born 1987) is an Estonian director-screenwriter. He has both a BA and MA degree in feature-film directing, both from the Baltic Film and Media School in Tallinn. He is the author of numerous award-winning short films, most notably "Olga", which received Special Jury Mention in Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2014. His debut feature-length film "The Riddle of Jaan Niemand'' premiered in 2018.

Besides directing and writing for his own projects, he has worked as a freelance script editor, lecturer and documentary editor in recent years.

Julia Idlis

Julia Idlis is a Tallinn-based screenwriter, writer/poet, and narrative designer. Originally from Moscow, Russia, she moved to live and work in Estonia in 2018 and soon joined the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communications School as a screenwriting teacher for the Kino Eyes program. Julia has a Ph.D. in philology from the Moscow University for her comprehensive analysis of the screenplays written by the British playwright and Nobel prize winner Harold Pinter. She has taught screenwriting and storytelling in Russia, Czech Republic, Estonia, and other countries.

Julia combines teaching with active work in both film and video game industry. As a screenwriter, she wrote two feature films and several TV shows. One of her TV shows called Fartsa was among the first Russian TV shows to be bought and shown by Netflix. As a narrative designer she took part in developing a wide range of video games including The X-Files: Deep State, a mobile game based on the popular American TV show and licensed by 20th Century Studios, USA.

As a writer/poet, Julia published several collections of poems and a non-fiction book on the origins and formative years of the Russian blogs and social networks (Runet: The Idols We Created). Her poems have been translated into English, Spanish, German, and other languages and won a number of literary awards. She is currently working on a series of sci-fi novels, the first book to be published in 2022.

Tarmo Rajaleid

Tarmo Rajaleid has a Master degree in Film Editing and teaches editing and film production workflows courses in Tallinn University Baltic Film, Media and Arts School where he also works as a Technical Director. He also has the Apple Certified Trainer qualification.