Creating her own unforgettable critters and turning to traditional folklore for inspiration, Estonian director Moonika Siimets tells three stories in The Black Hole [+leggi anche:
intervista: Moonika Siimets
scheda film], now being shown at Finland’s Night Visions. In it, she follows people – and other creatures – looking for love and attention.

Cineuropa: Despite all of the strange shenanigans in the film, it’s striking how much attention you pay to your characters. Did you want to balance the crazy with the universal?
Moonika Siimets: It’s a science-fiction movie, but for me, it’s about human beings and their everyday struggles and longings. As filmmakers, we can get really excited about special effects or puppets, but we still have to remember it’s all about people – in this case, people dreaming of a better future. I think the aliens, and all these other odd figures, are there to help me with this message. It was interesting to use fantastical elements to tell a dramatic – and comedic – story.

Their reactions are what makes it funny. Even when faced with close encounters of the third kind, your protagonists are not afraid: they are very practical about it.
Maybe it has something to do with our region? We have suffered so much, and we have this crazy history. Nothing surprises us any more. In our culture, in its folklore, magical realism is present in everyday life. It’s not uncommon for someone to tell you about saints, or claim the devil stole their scissors or that they got lost in the forest because of some spirit. These kinds of beliefs still exist, to a certain extent.

I actually studied folklore for a while, and I remember going to villages, looking for stories. Now, I was wondering how I could bring them into the city. And what if these are not saints, but rather aliens or a giant spider? We still overcome our fear and try to survive.

In the 1990s, everyone was talking about aliens, but it’s no longer the case. Maybe things got so crazy here on Earth that there’s no point in looking up at the sky?
It’s true – there’s too much going on. We even have the flat Earthers. I also remember that 1990s craze. One of my biggest fears as a child had to do with aliens coming to take me away.

And yet you make them likeable! Did creating physical creatures instead of using CGI help you with that?
It was clear from the beginning: I wanted real aliens. It makes things easier for the actors, but also, in some films, CGI characters can seem too perfect. They are too dream-like, and you don’t believe they’re actually there. I wanted mine to be clumsy and to feel authentic. They also had to seem friendly, yes. It’s so slimy, but then you look into its eyes, and there’s so much understanding or even forgiveness there. It was difficult because sometimes, there were ten people on set, working on one of them. But it’s an art.

A bit of a forgotten art, maybe. Is it more difficult to find these experts in Europe?
Oh yes. In the USA, you can find animatronic artists everywhere. My producer used to joke that The Black Hole is the first, and probably also the last, film like this to be made in our country [laughs]. It’s much cheaper to use AI or digital effects, but once we’d started, nobody wanted to go back. No one had ever done anything like that in Estonia before, and it was all about international teamwork. I worked with Finnish set designer Kari Kankanpää, Getter Vahar, my cinematographer Ivar Time, and Fito Dellibarda and Javier Coronilla from Spain. Fito’s already created animatronic dinosaurs, huge monkeys and unicorns. Javier has worked on George Lucas’s movies. Usually, they focus on a specific part of a creature. Now, they had a chance to build them from scratch.

In supernatural stories of any kind, humour isn’t always a given. Does it come from you?
I like strange, absurd, dark humour. It’s a part of me. I’m a very melancholic person, but I really love to laugh. It just helps me get on with my daily life, and I believe there needs to be some humour even in a very serious movie. These days, we do get comedies, but they are very broad, rather awful and not that funny. It’s such a difficult genre to master, but we need to make people laugh. It heals and empowers them. I’m all about mixing genres. I say that one eye should be laughing and the other one crying.

Sometimes, viewers assume that genre cinema is not for them. But you made this story very women-friendly, for example. Used to feeling invisible, some of them are at the centre of attention again.
At one point, I was thinking that maybe it’s about love. One viewer told me the same thing: she said my film gives her hope. She’s getting older, but now she believes that someone, even if it’s not an Estonian man, might still think she’s very special. We all want to be seen.

We must get over this assumption that some stories aren’t for us. It’s changing a bit, but it takes time. Estonian viewers hesitated, even though they say our core cinema audience consists of 50+ women. I talk about them in the film, but they were afraid to come. At festivals outside of the country, people understood this mix of genres and themes a bit better – they understood you can use sci-fi elements to tell a very human story. After watching my movie, some women told me: “I didn’t want to watch it at first, but then I did, and it wasn’t scary. It touched me.”