November

• Based on Andrus Kivirähk's 2000 novel 'Rehepapp ehk November,' which draws on Estonian folk tradition and F.R. Kreutzwald's 'Old Estonian Fairy Tales.'
• Estonia's official selection for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards (2018 ceremony); it was not nominated.
• Shot entirely in black-and-white, with the kratts brought to life through practical puppetry and mechanical rigs rather than CGI.
• Had its international premiere in the International Narrative Competition at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, where cinematographer Mart Taniel won the Best Cinematography award (the film had already opened domestically in Estonia in January 2017).
• Director Rainer Sarnet cast a mix of professional and non-professional Estonian actors as the villagers, aiming for a raw, weathered, folk-tale authenticity.
• The film also won Best Cinematography and the Programmer's Choice Award at Sitges 2017, plus Best Estonian Film at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The kratts aren't just folklore—they're a metaphor for Soviet collectivization: bodies built from scraps and bound to serve a master who discards them when they break. The Devil functions as the state, buying souls for the promise of efficiency and delivering only servitude.

Hans's obsession with the Baroness isn't love but class aspiration. He literally sells his soul to cross a social boundary that's already impossible, and the film frames his death not as romantic tragedy but as the inevitable endpoint of wanting to be something the village's ontology won't allow.

Liina's werewolf nights aren't rebellion so much as adaptability. She moves freely between human and animal, ritual and devotion, bending to whatever the world demands of her, while Hans is destroyed the moment he commits to one fixed obsession and one fixed bargain. The film seems to reward flexibility and punish certainty — folk survival instinct versus imported fantasy.

A poverty-stricken Estonian peasant girl named Liina pines for Hans, a farmhand who's fixated on a German baron's daughter he watches from the woods at night. Meanwhile, the dead return each November to visit the living, kratts—servant creatures built from farm tools and bound with a soul bought from the Devil—do the villagers' grunt work, and the plague itself stalks the countryside as a shapeshifting figure (sometimes a pale young woman, sometimes a white goat). Liina herself can turn into a wolf, using it to keep watch over Hans and the Baroness he can't stop watching. Hans strikes his own bargain with the Devil for a kratt of his own, hoping it can steal him the Baroness's affection — a debt he can't pay back. Shot in stark black-and-white, the film builds a world where Christianity and paganism coexist because neither one has won.