Madness

In the closing months of World War II, a remote forest asylum is marked for liquidation. As the German troops prepare to lead the patients into the woods, Gestapo officer Windisch arrives with a different mission: a British agent is said to be hiding among the lunatics, and Windisch must unmask the spy before the advancing Soviet army reaches the asylum. He narrows his suspects down to three—a former literary publisher, an army sergeant, and a man convinced he is the Führer himself. But the deeper Windisch probes the patients' impaired logic, the more his own grip on sanity begins to slip.

Hailed as the first truly modernist feature in Estonian cinema, this allegory of power, guilt and free will under totalitarianism was shot in Estonia and Latvia. The absurdist provocation was banned for two decades, and only officially premiered in Moscow in January 1987, under perestroika.

Jüri Järvet won Best Male Actor at the 1969 Baltic film festival. He was later in Tarkovsky's Solaris.

The film was restored by the Estonian Film Institute.