Marko Raat's film "The Snow Queen" is a wintry fairytale for adults. The unusual love story is based on the motifs of Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairytale. A woman (Helena Merzin) living in an ice castle lures a boy (Artur Tedremägi, an acting student at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre) to her. He becomes so spellbound by the woman and her land of ice that he forgets the real world. The woman hides the secret of why she is living in the cold from the boy. The film is a romantic drama about budding love between two people. Those, who remember H.C. Andersen's fairytale, will also remember that only a few lines spoke of the relationship between the boy and the Snow Queen. The question remained unanswered: what did the boy and the Snow Queen do in the ice castle for all of the time that the girl spent looking for the lost boy? This film talks about what Andersen didn't. In "The Snow Queen", the environment is extravagant and the relationships psychological and realistic.
The visually stunning story was mostly filmed in the storage freezer of an ice cream depot. A special interior was built, flooded with a lot of water and then frozen. Shooting took place in very extreme conditions with temperatures as cold as -20 degrees Celsius. When moving near the camera or icy walls, the crew had to wear respirators so that their warm breath wouldn't ruin the image quality. The walls of ice also became muted when people's breath froze onto them and had to be ironed to become lucid again. The exterior shooting was done on the other side of the polar circle, on the lovely, snowy slopes of northern Norway.
The film was made with support from the Estonian Film Foundation, the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, the Norwegian Film Institute, FilmCamp (Norway) and the EU MEDIA Programme. It is an Estonian-Norwegian co-production (F-Seitse OÜ and Pomor Film AS).
Marko Raat has made many successful films. His documentary "For Aesthetic Reasons" (1999) screened at over thirty film festivals and art exhibitions and won the Estonian Association of Film Journalists' prize for Best Film of the Year. His first feature film, "Agent Wild Duck" (2002), won the prizes for Best Film of the Year from the Estonian Association of Film Journalists' and the Estonian Cultural Endowment and for Best Debut from the Estonian National Culture Foundation. "Knife" (2007) received a Special Mention at the Deboshir Film Festival in St. Petersburg and the Estonian Cultural Endowment prize for Best Film. His documentary "Toomik's Movie" (2008) received a Special Mention at the Black Nights Film Festival and the National Culture Prize.
Technical info for "The Snow Queen": 35mm, Fuji, CinemaScope
(widescreen 1:2,35), color, Dolby SR, 95 minutes
