入围第24届塔林黑夜电影节主竞赛。 “What are you fiddling there?” – “What?” – “What are you fiddling?” – “I’m not fiddling anything!” – “Damn, I saw what you did there under the blanket – you were fiddling with your willie!” – “No, I wasn’t!” – “Do you want to become diseased? You could even die, if you fiddle!” It’s not an easy thing, the end of childhood. Particularly if you are a boy, growing up in a back yard of a stifling small town in Estonia at the beginning of the 1980s, get bullied at school and your life is otherwise tedious, and at home you have to suffer antiquated grandparents. It’s good that you have at least some friends, like asylum-certified Kolla and ex-convict Valter – both from the same back yard. The only place where life cannot trouble you with its worries is Lake Tamula – you can lose yourself fishing there for days. Grand master Peeter Simm’s film stays on the same wavelength with Olavi Ruitlane’s bestseller of the same title, being simultaneously “In the Back Yard” and “Spring”, comical and tragic, lyrical and grotesque, tender and cruel. There are a lot of ‘firsts’ here: the first willie-fiddling, the first love, the first close encounter with death, plus a number of farcical events which can only happen in the fertile conditions of the Soviet absurd. Because the back yard is the theatre stage of the populace, where everyone directs the play called “My Life”. Still, it is not a story of the Soviet absurd and the end of an era, but about the possibilities of staying human in an imperfect world. All the characters of this innocently authentic universe – from the recidivist to the communist – wish to be loved. And that is the most important thing. Tiit Tuumalu