Let’s talk about pigs. They could be either ‘Babe’, the Mad Max of green prairies, or the allegorical boars in “Porcile”, or, even of the same kind, the pigs that lead “The Revolution of Pigs”, the magnificent debut film by Jaak Kilmi and Rene Reinumagi.
To try to imagine what an Estonian film would be like is the same as trying to imagine a film from Cyprus or a Somali one: there are few previous comparisons, so it is a useless effort. That is the reason why we give a complicit smile from the first shot of a film about summer camps, that reminds us of the initiation rites of puberty in films such as “Meatballs”. It also gives us that sense of warm immediacy that “Fucking Amal” or “Together” provided – two features by the Swede Lukas Moodysson, with which it shares the same cheerful and unconcerned spirit, the same aims in discovery with some of the characters having the same desire to lose their virginity.
It is not strange then, at the Moscow International Film Festival, where it received a surprising Jury Special Prize, that both the critics and the audience reacted negatively, maybe because, over Duran Duran’s greatest hits, behind the intimacy that tents provide shining as glow-worms in the night, a time for first loves and first drunkenness, “The Revolution of Pigs” throws several tons of rotten tomatoes in the face of the old Soviet communism, which oppressed the Baltic States. Pigs mean chaos, devouring the traces of a regime that applauded with so much enthusiasm the war of Afghanistan as much as the USA is now doing with the war in Iraq. Pigs are sniffing among the garbage. Pigs are the children of the revolution and, in this fortunate Estonian film, revolution must be by the young or not at all.
© FIPRESCI 2004