“Who am I smiling at?” tells the story of how a boy faces the death of his mother and how the mother prepares her son for death. Additionally, Oliver faces a custody issue with his sister. Mägi said that it was emotionally very difficult to make the documentary. “It was a very difficult film, mentally the hardest film I have ever made.”
Filming with the family lasted two and a half years. “We were there when Mari, aka Oliver’s mother, started dying, when she died, when she had her funeral, when they brought her sister back and when she was taken away again,” he described director. “We were there for all the very tragic events.”
“I cried a lot once,” Mägi admitted. “It was the second time I went to film and Mari hadn’t seen her daughter yet, they hadn’t seen each other for eight months, and we agreed that it would be an audiovisual love letter to her daughter. Seeing the love and sincerity with which Mari spoke to the camera, she spoke to the camera as if she were talking to her daughter,” the director described which scene touched him the most. “At the time of filming, I didn’t react and held back returned professionally, but I remember when I got home, I started crying hard.”
In an interview with Eesti Ekspres in November, Mägi explained why he became a director, despite also having a career as a lawyer. “When I was five years old, my aunt Helen took me to the cinema in Kuressaare. I didn’t know what this cinema was. We were late, we entered the cinema, people were watching “The Terminator” and I was absolutely thrilled: my God, there is such a big TV! Later we moved to Tallinn and from the third grade I always skipped school to go to the cinema.”
“I loved it so much, I didn’t choose at all, I watched everything, I just loved the feeling of love in my stomach that going to the cinema gave me. Everything was fine, what I saw on the screen. I went to see Titanic 11 times. I cried every time!” said the director.
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2023-12-06 16:59:15
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