Liis Nimik is something of an Estonian multi-hyphenate: a graduate in economics, a successful editor of fiction films and now, a successful producer of documentary films, not to mention director of Sundial, which was selected for the Hot Docs Changing Face of Europe programme in April 2023.
She turned to production as, being active in the film world, many people would “test” their stories on her, especially their doc projects. She “kind of knew” these had little chance of getting made, even if she could see that some of the projects had a certain X factor. “So there was nothing else to do, I had to produce them myself,” Nimik tells BDE.
“These [economic] skills that I have from the past and that I acquired from the editing, they somehow match very well for documentary production,” she comments. “Because in documentary, you need constantly to make decisions about what to film, when to film, how much to film, and it’s really related to the story. And yeah, in my case, I feel that [my skills] benefit each other very well.”
So is documentary production preferable to fiction production? “Yeah, absolutely,” Nimik responds. “I have no ambition in fiction production. It’s horrible if you think about all these big teams and negotiations. I love documentary because it’s very intimate and it’s just actually my main philosophy to make films with friends or people that I really trust. I think this is a key to how to survive in this industry mentally, and in every way.”
The producer talks about finding a sweet spot in documentary production somewhere between ambition and the unexpected. “I’m really interested in the meeting point of these two things because I have discovered that this is the key of actually making good films at all levels. Ambition is not enough. You have to be able to allow life itself to kind of involve itself in your project.”
She further describes how her work as an editor informs her producing. “I edited four feature films, so somehow it helps me to develop this sense of structure or let’s say a prediction of a structure… it’s like a rhythm inside you that tells you that, yes, this is going in the right direction, or no, this is not going in the right direction.”
That said, Nimik admitted to BDE in April 2023 that she got “a bit burned out” in her past life editing features. It’s a discipline she loves (and is doing a PHD on the subject) but on much of the art house films on which she was working there was “not a lot of script” and the stories had to be found during the post-production. That put extra pressure on her. The films all turned out well in the end, securing berths in prestigious festivals. “But to sit there in a cubicle in a small room for years and years…somehow I felt I needed to get out.”
Nimik has two doc projects in development right now; The Story of the Wild Rose by Kristen Aigro and Miguel Llansó, planned for a 2026 premiere; and Fugu and Little Birdie by Eeva Mägi, planned for a premiere in 2027.
In Sundial, her Hot Docs Changing Face of Europe film, she sets out to find fellow Estonians who embody the same optimism as her late grandmother. “We went on a journey through Estonia to find these people and every time I felt the same profound peace,” the director told BDE . “In many ways, we made the film together with the characters…they were kind of our partners in crime.” What they all had in common was their shared inner tranquility.
The film was shot at the same time as fellow Estonian Anna Hints’s Sundance-winning Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. The pair studied together at the Baltic Film School in Tallinn.
“We had a parallel journey that she was shooting for seven years and I was shooting for seven years,” Nimik says of Hints. “Now it happened that the films came out in the same year, and the places where we shot were very close to each other, and so there is some sort of parallelism between the two films. But hers of course, goes right to the topic. Mine is more like a poem, so they’re not comparable in that sense. But I’m so happy for her. I’m also so amazed that an Estonian documentary can go so far. It’s amazing. I really loved the feeling that her film created in me, and I am sure it’s completely universal and it goes all over the world. I see every day from Facebook how they are doing the Oscar campaign, and I’m really crossing my fingers.”
