On Thursday, November 9, the 6th Annual New York Baltic Film Festival (NYBFF) will present a special evening in support of Ukraine. The program will feature a screening of the short documentary What Would You Take? (Mille Sina võtaksid, dir. Heilika Pikkov, Estonia, 2023, 23 min.), followed by a panel moderated by Andrew Horodysky (Ukrainian Institute of America) with director Heilika Pikkov, painter Lesia Khomenko, and art historian and curator Katherine Carl, and will conclude with a concert by Estonian musician Maria Faust.
Home. Your home. Your place. Your memories. Your belongings. In the blink of eye, it’s gone. Heilika Pikkov’s What Would You Take? tells the stories of 12 people from Ukraine who suddenly had to leave their home, taking only the bare essentials and a cherished belonging that speaks to their life.
After the screening, Andrew Horodysky will moderate a panel exploring how to support Ukrainian culture today. Estonian composer and saxophonist Maria Faust will end the evening with a performance.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Heilika Pikkov is a documentary filmmaker and internationally well-known curator and cultural manager from Estonia. She studied film and television directing at Tallinn University and spent a semester at the University of Central Lancashire in UK. She has directed several documentaries, including Flowers from the Mount of Olives (2013), which had great success in Estonian cinemas and had its international premiere at the Locarno FF, and My Flesh and Blood (2018), which won Best Short Film of the Year at the Estonian Film and Television Awards.
ABOUT THE MUSICIAN
Maria Faust (B. 1979, Kuressaare, Estonia) is an Estonian freelance saxophone player, composer and arranger currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark, who is best known for her work in the fields of experimental jazz, big band music, contemporary classical music, avant-garde, improvised music, and other alternative music styles. She is currently releasing and has released under STUNT, ERP, ILK, BUSH FLASH and Gotta Let it Out record labels. Faust’s musical education began in 1986 as a classical piano student at the Kuressaare Music School on her home island of Saaremaa. After high school, she moved to Tallinn and studied at the Georg Ots Tallinn Music College. When a short study period to become a Conductor at the Tallinn Conservatoire was over, she moved to Denmark to pursue studies in jazz saxophone. Charismatic and eccentric, Maria Faust is one of the most successful Estonian jazz musicians of all-time and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and honors including multiple Danish and Estonian Music Awards. Her work and musical language as a composer and improviser is unique and easily identifiable to those who have heard it, while being challenging to describe due to its inventiveness and combined influences.
Photo by Toomas Volkmann