Estonian-Latvian film gets prestigious award

RIGA - "Good Hands," an Estonian-Latvian joint feature film, took home the LVT Manfred Salzgeber Prize at the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany this week.

The prize is awarded to an innovative feature film that has a distributor in no more than one European country. The film received a 25,000 euro ($21,700) purse. The French firm Laser Video Titres will subtitle the film in up to three languages. "Good Hands" shared the prize with the Slovenian movie "The Border Guard."

The film was cowritten and directed by Estonian filmmaker Peeter Simm ("Rollercoaster," "Ideal Landscape," "The Man Who Never Was"), and it is being lauded as a landmark coproduction between the two Baltic countries.

The cast and crew are made up of people from both countries, and the project was funded by both the Estonian Film Foundation and the Latvian National Film Center, as well as the Latvian and Estonian cultural endowments, and the commission supporting the international coproduction of films.

"Good Hands" is a comedy about a young woman, Margita (played by Latvian actress Rezija Kalnina), who steals everything she can get her hands on. She flees Riga when she feels that the police are getting too close to her, and she ends up in the small depressed village of Vineeri, Estonia.

She ultimately falls in with three men and a boy in the town who, despite the fact that she only causes trouble wherever she goes, only see the good in her.

Margita falls back into her old ways and finds herself in trouble before long. She seduces one of the men, a policeman, to cover her tracks and they become lovers. As time goes by, the men realize that they have a thief living under their roof, and Margita has to flee again.

The judges at the Berlinale film festival praised Simm's and co-writer Toomas Raudam's screenplay and Simm's direction, and they took note of the film's ending, which has some surprising twists that will keep the audience guessing.

"The film was screened four times during the Berlin festival, the hall was full every time, and the feedback from the audience was positive," said Artur Talvik, the producer of "Good Hands."