02/05/2023 - Estonian director Liis Nimik’s documentary is a primal, oneiric film that subverts audiences’ expectations, portraying the state of nature and everything that's connected within it

After helming several shorts, acclaimed Estonian editor and producer Liis Nimik's first feature-length documentary as a director, Sundial, has screened at Hot Docs as part of European Film Promotion's The Changing Face of Europe programme, after world-premiering in Visions du Réel’s International Medium Length & Short Film Competition. It begins as a cryptic, meditative film, and takes its time to reveal its ideas and intentions. Still, in a documentary like this, it is probable that each viewer will have their own interpretation.

The picture consists almost exclusively of static shots with a 16 mm camera, courtesy of cinematographer Erik Põllumaa. It is winter in an Estonian village, and we see unnamed people gathering wood, hanging out with their families or sitting inside on their own. The opening scene shows a young man making a pyre out of big branches, with the fire up front in the shot, roaring in Israel Bañuelos' sound design. His work is central to the film, just like basic natural elements or people's desire to make music. Different kinds of drones – melodic, windy or whistling ones – accompany various scenes of landscapes, forests, trees and a dark-blue lake, mixing with sounds from nature.

A long-haired man is seen sitting with his three small kids, playing chess with one of them. The girl, who is probably the second-eldest, is singing softly, and the man corrects her last note. Later, he will be seen playing what looks like a small tuba, while Mum helps the daughter with her schoolwork. The three curious kids will be seen several times as they explore their surroundings, but Nimik doesn't treat them or any other character as protagonists. Perhaps it would be more fitting to simply call them "humans".

There is a man playing an electric guitar in his shed or garage, with Soviet-era furnaces warming up the place. An elderly, solitary lady is mostly just sitting inside, her face lit up by the fire's glow. A man delivers firewood to an apartment block, and a bit of banter he has with an unseen tenant is probably the liveliest among the rare exchanges in the film. A woman in her thirties plays an accordion to a YouTube track. Slowly, spring arrives, and we see her pulling up a bucket of crystal-clear water from a well. Soon the sun is shining, and the humans leave their abodes.

And then there are animals: sheep, cows, dogs, cats and a single, lonely horse. They are as present as humans in the film, but the viewer will naturally try to connect various people to find out what they have in common or what differences exist between them, trained as our brains are to look for narratives. But there appears to be no community here, until a scene in the last third of the film, where we suddenly see a large group crammed into a room, loudly debating an ambiguous "joining of two communities".

We also tend to think in terms of unity of time and place, and at first, it seems unclear what kind of a village this is: there are many isolated houses and it looks like no one has a close neighbour, while on the other hand, there are apartment blocks. But the closing titles inform us that the documentary was filmed in rural areas in different parts of the country.

Sundial is a truly cinematic experience, a feat of natural images that gain a gravity and depth through the grainy 16 mm cinematography. It is primal and oneiric, subverting viewers' expectations in a subtle way. But what it actually ends up doing is pretty radical, which you can conclude only after you've left the cinema and thought about it. Perhaps it even warrants another watch.

Sundial was produced by Estonia's Klara Films OÜ, and Taskovski Films has the international rights.