“I am a phoenix bird. It’s hard for me take off and fall.” writes Katja. She is a kindergarten teacher in Narva, a border town between Estonia and Russia. She was born in 1992, with the new Estonian Republic, in a Russian speaking family and environment. Katja considers that her generation was an experiment for the new republic. Today she is trapped between languages that reflect opposite positions about war and peace and freedom.
“I have been filming Katja since 2016. We made a first film together “Eksperiment Katja”. Today we wanted to continue and focus on languages. When I was in Tallinn and Narva at the end of March 2022, shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, I could see that Katja did not want to express her opinion. Katja lives in Narva, Russian speaking town in Estonia. In Narva people are split today, divided between those listening to voices of Russia or voices of Europe. Katja identifies with a phoenix, a phoenix that is coming back to life like the coexistence of Russian and Estonian speakers in her country.”
Biography
Eleonore de Montesquiou is French-Estonian, she was born in 1970 in Paris.
Her work revolves around the articulation between private and official histories, personal and national identities. It tackles the intricacies and ambiguities of living in the margins, based on her personal experience of up rootedness. Eleonore is primarily working with film, she tapes testimonies, creating prosthetic memories of repressed histories. In her documentary-informed works, her camera becomes the voice of these voiceless people. Her work is based on a documentary approach, translated in films, drawings and texts; it deals mainly with the search for freedom, issues of integration/immigration/meaning of a nation in Estonia, giving voice to the Russian community. Since 2007, she films women living on the Estonian-Russian border town of Narva: “Na Grane”, in 2016, she started working with asylum seekers from French speaking countries in Estonia: “Hope is no home” while pursuing a long time film project in France with peasants in the Haute-Alpes : “Traverses”.
