Returning from Precarity – 30 Decades of Rebuilding Estonian Film Industry: A Case of Film Education

Abstract

Due to its idiosyncratic circumstances, the film industry of Estonia and its higher education system offers a compelling case study. Estonian language film education celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2022. Three decades of its history are densely intertwined with the “second independence” period of the Estonian state. It is a period of a nation-state returning from the brink, the film industry rebuilding itself from an almost full collapse and the three-decade-long build-up of film education from non-existence to a highly specialised professional curriculum culminating with a student Academy Award-winning graduation film in 2020 (Minu kallid laibad/My dear corpses, German Golub, 2020, Estonia). In order to have a birds-eye view of the three decades of the growth of Estonian film education and its reciprocal relationship with the film industry, I used a unique data source – the Estonian film database (www.efis.ee), which was opened in 2012 and is one of the most comprehensive national film databases. For this article, the EFD database was combined with a new data corpus created specifically for researching Estonian language film education, consisting of all students who graduated between 1992-2016 (the cohorts of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were not included because these intakes had either graduated too recently or have not graduated yet). This data corpus was the basis of SQL queries to the EFD database. One of the tasks of the queries was to track changes over time and also look into the effect of specialisations within the curriculum. The key finding is that film education in the case of a small nation cinema that produces active filmmakers, in the size of the Estonian film industry, has to resolve two aspects of teaching – the length of study and the number of specialisations. Our data confirms that the duration of education is an important factor. Cohorts who were able to study for either four or five years have collectively achieved a stronger position in the industry than cohorts who studied under the three-year Bologna system BA and did not go on to an MA program. Also, professional specialisation within a comprehensive multi-disciplinary curriculum promotes rapid advancement into the film industry. Large-scale change is visible and connected to the introduction of a curriculum structure known in film schools as the “six-pack system”, i.e., where screenwriters, producers, directors, cinematographers, editors, and sound designers study together, the same number of students in each discipline, comprising a skeleton crew of HODs (heads of department) for their student films. Another key finding is that the career paths of graduate directors follow a similar pattern, but it is possible, through targeted interventions, to shorten the bridge between film school graduation and the first feature film. Directing entails tacit knowledge that can only be acquired through regular practice.