The Story takes place in a rural Estonian village. A family has taken a little orphan girl, Tiina to live with them.
Tiinas mother was tortured and Killed for being a witch.
They have a son Margus and another daughter, a blonde girl, Mari, whom Margus is supposed to marry in the future.
The kids grow up and Margus falls in Love with the dark-haired Tiina, who is the livelier and prettier of the two.
Mari, being jealous, starts accusing Tiina of being a libahunt and a witch during the villagers spring-time fertility games.
The rumour catches on with the superstitious villagers, and soon everyone is convinced of the fact.
The whispers and suspicious glances grow more hostile, until the wrathful crowd gathers in the town square and
the villagers team up against Tiina,circling her and shouting accusations, she has no option but to escape the village,
running into the forest.
"Its better to live alone in the woods than stay here with you people!"
She shouts, as she runs away.
Margus goes in the woods to seek her.
He is having hallucinations of finding her on a lakeshore, they go into the water giggling, playing around and hugging each other.
When he opens his eyes he is standing in the water, alone.
Never in the movie is it clearly expressed if the libahunt is real or only the imagination of the brainwashed villagers.
We never see a wolf in the movie. There are some sequences of running in the forest, filmed at waist level,
which could be interpreted as wolfs-eye-view. Or it could be a flashback into Tiinas childhood, when she has ran into the forest
after watching her mother being whipped to death.
The movie uses flashbacks and cuts back and forth in time to reveal the storyline bit by bit, deepening the drama layer by layer.
The only one who seems to know the truth of the matter is the old blind grandmother of the family.
Maybe she also is a witch, but has learned not to reveal everything she knows.
The way she is portrayed in the film, often against a black background, illuminated by a single ray of light from above,
seems to emphasize her hidden spiritual wisdom.
Even if the film is in black and white, the director has used some very modern, even avant-garde techniques.
There are repeat cuts (when Mari is accusing Tiina of being a libahunt the same line is repeated thrice),
and at one point the lower part of the screen is filled with flames,for a while, as if the actual film is burning (at the stake?).
Also the use of music in the movie is very modern, fusing traditional instruments and human voices in a expressive way,
to emphasize the emotions of the characters and the tension of the dramatic events.
The Opening credits sequence is magnificent, setting the horrific mood with eerie music and beautiful hand-made lettering.
The Film may also be a commentary on the tragic fate of the Estonian people.
The Christian religion came to Estonia from the east (Russia). So it is possible to look at the blind faith and mass psychosis
of the villagers as a metaphor for Soviet communist indoctrination, turning Estonians against each other,
very actual at the time when the film was made. The Original customs, beliefs and traditions of Estonians were now banned and the
laws and rules of the conquerors were the new norm, enforced by violent punishments to those who failed to
agree. Even though the Communist doctrine itself was atheist, the parallels are not too far fetched between crusaders bringing
christianity to pagan Estonia with "sword and fire", and the communists bringing a new order and a new political system to bourgeois Estonia.
The angry looks on the faces of the villagers are filled with holy rage, against the enemy of the "state" (village),
real or imagined, it does not matter, the main point is to conform, to not stick out.
The angry mob feeds off of its own negative energy by finding a common enemy, someone to blame for all the hardships they suffer.
One more meta-level hidden in the film is the feminist message.
The movie was directed by a woman, after all.
Tiina is a Strong woman, naturally beautiful, intelligent and independent.
She must be destroyed in order to strengthen the patriarchal system of the church.
She represents the wild, natural state of things, the ancient mother goddess,
and poses a threat to the paternalistic hierarchy.
In the original Play Tiina returns to the village with a pack of wolves in the form of a wolf.
The villagers are terrified, and in the ensuing chaos
Margus shoots at the wolves with a shotgun, hitting one.
It ends up being Tiina, who transforms into human form and dies bleeding at his arms.
The movie has a slightly different ending.
Tiina returns from the forest after being away for 3 days.
She comes back to her house of upbringing to get Margus.
They want to know how she survived 3 days with no food or drink.
"As if you did not know!", Mari screams.
Tiina makes a long and emotional speech to the family that raised her.
They are seated around the kitchen table, while Tiina is standing up at the front door.
"You gave me bread", she says.
This could be a reference to the myth that giving bread to a werewolf breaks the curse.
Tiina tells Margus several times to come with her and leave the village.
Margus gets up and wants to leave with Tiina but his father stops him and tells him in no uncertain terms to sit back down.
In the end Tiina dismisses the family telling them among other things, that "you people dont know what love is".
She leaves for the forest once again and Margus is torn between two choices,
to listen to his father or to listen to his heart. He hesitates for a long time,
crying and finally starts to run after Tiina, but its too late, she has already disappeared.
He returns to the family cabin, grief-stricken. Everybody including Mari, looks at him with extremely sullen expressions.
Blind Grandmother sits silently in the corner.
The End.
The actors in the film were absolutely brilliant.
The grandmother was excellent.
The crowd scenes with the villagers were superb, whether celebrating the rites of spring or forming an angry lynch-mob.
Some parts were reminiscent of Bergmans depictions of middle age village life.
Ene Rämmeld is gorgeous and believeable as Tiina.
Especially memorable is the scene where she saves Margus´s life after he is bitten by a snake. She is seen hesitating
for a moment or two before sucking the venom out with her mouth, as the horrified villagers look on.
She knows that if she saves Margus,it will strenghten her reputation as a witch.
The superstitious villagers are brainwashed enough to overlook the fact that she actually is performing a healing operation,
and not doing any kind of evil "black magic".
She is well aware of the situation, but decides to save her loved one, even though it means she herself will be in
trouble for showing her "magic" skills in public.
The Film is professionally directed, well paced and there are no dull moments.
The music of Veljo Tormis is hauntingly beautiful.
It is a movie to be seen again and again and deserves wider exposure in the west.
Libahunt is a Story with roots in ancient folklore.
Baltic people have age-old tales of witches able to transform themselves into wolves.
The werewolf looks like any normal wolf and only can be spotted by a white mark on the neck or a certain necklace.
The werewolf attacks household animals and livestock in the back and eats their raw flesh.
The werewolf can also spread its curse unto others.
To break the curse of the werewolf it has to be fed bread, preferably from a forged steel blade. Then the wolf will turn to man once again.
When Estonia was christianized in the crusades, old folk beliefs were to be wiped away.
It is possible that pre-christian Shamans who were capable of transforming themselves into animals,
had to be demonized by the christian church and old healers and "witches" had to be removed and replaced by the christian church and its priests.
Old documents show that courts have had suspected werewolves actually being executed, in Tallinn, 1615 and 1618 and in Viru Nigula in 1640.
In 1617, six women were burnt to death for witchcraft, after being severely tortured.
First, a woman was brought to justice. She was said to have been a werewolf for ten years.
Tortured, the woman confessed to five other women as co-offenders. All six were sentenced to death by the court.
The Famous Story of "Little red riding hood" usually credited to Brothers Grimm also has its origins in folk tales for example from Italy, North Africa and Norway.
So these kind of stories can be said to have a common global history.
Where they originally come from is uncertain, but at least in the Baltic countries there is a very old tradition of werewolf lore.
One very good question to ask oneself is, were the original werewolves really evil?
Or is this another case of Hollywoodization of ancient myths, where the werewolf is just another watered down bogey-man, with Frankenstein, Dracula and the mummy (sometimes in the same movie!)
What we consider voodoo is some doll with needles stuck to it to cause harm to an enemy.
This has nothing to do with real voodoo (vodoun) which is the official religion of Benin. Vodoun has to do with drumming, dancing , calling of the spirits, spirit-possession and trance.
The voodoo-doll is the invention of Hollywood script-writers.
Still most people think Voodoo is sticking pins into a doll.
The same thing happened to the werewolf myth.
It could be that the werewolf was originally a shaman, maybe wearing a wolf skin, who in a shamanic trance made journeys to the spirit realm as a wolf,
Or was protected by the spirit of his or her power animal.
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