Film Museum

This guide to the Film Museum in Tallinn starts with a number that shouldn't add up: nearly forty-five million Soviet cinema tickets sold for a 1969 film made in a country of barely a million people. It follows directors Grigori Kromanov and Kalju Komissarov as they adapted a nineteenth-century novel about a knight, a stolen relic and a runaway bride, filmed among the same limestone cliffs visible from the museum today, and asks how a small Tallinn studio outmaneuvered censors who expected a standard costume drama. That studio, founded in 1931 and later folded into the Soviet system as Tallinnfilm, is the subject the red-carpet film alley outside traces from its earliest days.