Madli Lääne is an Estonian film director, writer, editor and lecturer. She holds an MFA in Film and Media Production from the University of Texas at Austin and studied editing at the international film school ifs internationale filmschule Köln. She has worked as a freelance film editor since 2007, while her work as a filmmaker often explores the relationship between film and dance. Her dance film Dear Passengers (2022) received the Estonian Film and Television Industry Award (EFTA) for Best Short Film and the award for Best Baltic Short at 2ANNAS in Riga. The film has been presented at numerous international festivals, including Palm Springs ShortFest, Busan International Short Film Festival, PÖFF Shorts, Encounters Film Festival, Uppsala Short Film Festival and Leeds International Film Festival. Her thesis film Three August Days (2018) screened at more than 75 international festivals and received 19 awards. Lääne currently lectures in film at the Baltic Film and Media School at Tallinn University.
YES! moves through the corners, slopes, dead ends and curves of Tallinn’s Cruise Terminal, turning its architecture into a space for reflecting on the logic of the achievement society. Movement constantly encounters the built environment: the body searches for a way forward, runs into obstacles, turns and adapts. What initially appears to be a playful encounter with space gradually becomes a question of how we live and what we expect of ourselves. Do we constantly have to squeeze ourselves into predetermined frameworks in order to reach a goal? Can we allow ourselves a turn, a dead end, a mistake—and the possibility of not always moving forward? With a simple and playful shift in perspective, YES! opens up a space for questioning the idea of perpetual progress.