Estonian writer and psychiatrist Vahing chronicled the cultural and social life of the city of Tartu between 1968 and 1984. He was fascinated by liminal situations, instances in which people are ready to give up on themselves. He called it a social “Spiel”, or game. Observing bohemian pleasures, circulating among intellectuals, and documenting the most conservative period of the Soviet era, Vahing established his bottom line: life must be sacrificed in the name of art.

Estonian director Rainer Sarnet won the main prize of the RIGA IFF Feature Competition in 2017 for his allegorical, black-and-white film November (2017). Here, he delves into the minute history and colorful personality of Vahing’s diagnoses of social issues. The documentary portrait with staged scenes is not only a subjectively produced history of illness, but also a delicate postscript for the era. At the same time, the film affirms Sarnet’s interest in literary classics: he finds new forms in the incendiary classic Vahing’s words after having brought Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp, ehk November to screens.