Priit Pärn 

Chris Robinson (author of the bible on Estonian animation – Between Genius & Utter Illiteracy – A Story Of Estonian Animation), has described Priit Pärn, the most celebrated of Estonia’s animators, as ‘an illegitimate cross-breeding of George Grosz, Monty Python and Jean-Luc Godard’. Pärn’s brilliance lies in his ability to cut into the very bedrock of social strata, East European and Western, communist and capitalist. As a chronicler of individual vanity and collective foolishness, he is consistently scathing – and graphically stunning. From the twenty films he’s produced we’ve selected three that reflect his responses to a decade of profound social change in Eastern Europe. Breakfast On The Grass (1987, 28 mins); the crushing absurdities of the communist regime are vividly enacted in four vignettes of daily life. Hotel E (1991, 30 mins); as the iron curtain parts, Pärn cuts between dreamy American decadence and the Kafkaesque legacy of communism. The Night Of The Carrots (1998, 30 mins); Pärn pillories the grip computers have upon our lives and the madness of celebrity worship. — MT