The Riddle of Jaan Niemand (Põrgu Jaan) (2018)

Celebrating 20 years of bold and fabulous auteur cinema by Homeless Bob Production. We will continue our retrospective and the Christmas month with one of the most picturesque films about a very dark period in Estonian history “The Riddle of Jaan Niemand” by Kaur Kokk. 

Estonia at the end of ten ravaging years of Nordic War, plague and famine. The country has been desolated, the few people remaining are suffering from serious neglect and devoid of hope. Farmers discover an unconscious stranger on the beach and quickly bring him to a manor house. He manages to recover – though he can’t even remember his name. He is no one at all, as unfamiliar to himself as the hostile environment he finds himself in. The baron’s little son is listless, the serfs are superstitious and insubordinate. A suitcase that washes ashore gives the stranger a name: Jaan Niemand, a German-Baltic doctor. His advice is sorely needed. But who is he really? What is the story behind his scar and the dead nag? What if he no longer wants to be the man he apparently once was? Clues for a potential solution to the riddle pile up, but they don’t bode well: when a dead woman returns from Hell and foretells a deluge, it begins to rain. This film was created alongside four others in the scope of the celebration of the one-hundredth birthday of the Republic of Estonia.