(Credits: Warner Bros. Records)
Estonia isn’t a country you would normally associate with filmmaking. The ex-Soviet nation, which only regained its independence in 1991, has a very humble movie industry, with one poll estimating that only 13 feature-length films were made there in 2011. Still, that isn’t to say that the country hasn’t produced its fair share of creative geniuses. Take Rainer Sarnet, for example, an Estonian director who is, to put it bluntly, completely bonkers.
He’s probably best known for his 2017 folk horror November, which was Estonia’s submission for that year’s ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ at the Oscars. It failed to get nominated but did receive international attention, which is more than can be said for most Estonian films. Five years later, Sarnet returned with his new work, one that got everybody talking. What were they saying? Some variation of “This is the craziest damn thing I’ve ever seen”.
The Invisible Fight is an action comedy starring Ursel Tilk as Raphael. A fan of heavy metal music who has become disillusioned under Estonia’s Soviet government, Raphael makes a discovery that will change his life forever – a secret society of Eastern Orthodox monks who practice kung fu to the music of Black Sabbath. If that doesn’t fill you with childish glee, then apologies, but there is something seriously wrong with you.
Sarnet has been obsessed with Orthodox culture ever since he studied Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot whilst planning to adapt it for film. “I was listening to many Orthodox songs,” he told IndieWire. “I was googling something about Orthodoxy almost every evening.” He discovered a book called Not of this World, which detailed the life of a monk and soldier who was stationed on the Soviet-Chinese border. His name was Father Raphael, and that’s when Sarnet got his idea.
When asked why he decided to make the movie an absurdist comedy instead of a straight historical drama, Sarnet said that this was more in line with the sense of humour of the monks he had met during his research. “I visited that monastery in Russia four times,” he said, detailing the extent of his studying. “I also visited different monasteries in Athens, Greece and Serbia. It was like orthodox tourism for me.”
He got in so deep that he ended up converting to Orthodoxy, which allowed him to ask the big questions. “I asked my spiritual father at the monastery, ‘Is it OK to use Black Sabbath in such context?’ And he said, ‘Of course, Ozzy [Osbourne] is a believer.’”
By his own admission, Sarnet wasn’t into kung fu before he started making The Invisible Fight, so he threw himself into the world of martial arts movies to make his own work more authentic. His favourite was the 1979 Hong Kong-made Dance of the Drunken Mantis, the final film to star legendary movie fighter Yuen Siu-tien. He worked with Taiwanese stunt coordinator Eddie Tsai to create what he called “Orthodox kung fu”, a mixture of traditional martial arts and religious poses.
After cleaning up at the 2024 Estonian Film Awards, where it won in nine out of the ten categories it was nominated in, The Invisible Fight found itself on the international film circuit, including the Texas-based Fantastic Fest. It was nominated for the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland and was picked up for North American distribution by the company Kino Lorber.
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter
This post was originally published on here
