Homeless Bob Production celebrated 20 years with a special screening
On 19 August, Homeless Bob Production marked its 20th anniversary with a special open-air screening of Veiko Õunpuu’s Autumn Ball (orig. Sügisball) in Lasnamäe, Tallinn – the very place where the story of both the film and the production company began twenty years ago.
Founded in 2006 by director Veiko Õunpuu and producer Katrin Kissa, Homeless Bob Production has become one of the leading voices in Baltic auteur cinema. The company’s beginnings are closely linked to Õunpuu’s first feature film, Autumn Ball, based on the novel of the same name by Mati Unt. To make the film, Õunpuu and Kissa brought together a small group of friends, filmmakers and actors. In 2007, Autumn Ball premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize in the Orizzonti section, becoming the first Estonian film to receive an award at Venice. The film marked the beginning of Homeless Bob Production’s journey as a producer of auteur cinema. In 2011, Autumn Ball was voted the greatest Estonian film of all time by Estonian film critics and film professionals.
For its 20th anniversary, Homeless Bob returned to where it all began. Kino Sõprus presented Autumn Ball in Lasnamäe, the district where the film was shot twenty years ago and where its interconnected stories unfold. The sold-out screening drew nearly 400 people to Priisle Park before sunset.
“It’s astonishing that the anniversary number is already 20,” says producer Katrin Kissa. “When I recently drove around the Autumn Ball locations in Lasnamäe, it felt as if it had all happened only yesterday. But when I look at the impressive list of Homeless Bob films, I can hardly believe how much we have made. In that sense, time is a strange thing, almost like an amorphous substance that you can’t really do anything with, yet you feel its passage very physically, especially in film production – because there is always too little of it.”
Over the past two decades, Homeless Bob Production’s films have premiered and competed at some of the world’s leading film festivals, from Venice and Berlin to Sundance and Tribeca. Its acclaimed productions include Veiko Õunpuu’s The Temptation of St. Tony (2009), Free Range (2013) and The Last Ones (2020), as well as Rainer Sarnet’s Idiot (2011), November (2017) and The Invisible Fight (2023). The company has also been involved in numerous international co-productions, including Natasha Merkulova and Alexey Chupov’s Captain Volkonogov Escaped (2021), which premiered in the main competition at the Venice Film Festival. Homeless Bob’s films are characterised by bold artistic choices, distinctive storytelling and a strong auteur vision.
The company’s 20th anniversary celebrations will continue throughout the autumn and winter with a special retrospective at Kino Sõprus. September will feature Veiko Õunpuu’s Empty (2006) and Autumn Ball (2007), followed in October by The Temptation of St. Tony (2009), Free Range (2013) and Natasha Merkulova and Alexey Chupov’s The Man Who Surprised Everyone (2018). November will bring Rainer Sarnet’s November (2017) and The Idiot (2011), while the programme concludes in December with Sarnet’s The Invisible Fight (2023), Kaur Kokk’s The Riddle of Jaan Niemand (2018) and Õunpuu’s The Last Ones (2020)
Photos of the 19 August screening (phototgrapher Gen-Horret Rand)
