My Dear Mother TV Series Premiered at PÖFF: Doris Tääker Interview
One of the standout series at PÖFF 2025 was “Minu Kallis Ema” (My Dear Mother), a gripping Estonian-Ukrainian co-production that has been making waves on the international festival circuit. The series, which premiered at Berlinale and has travelled to Germany, Romania, Italy, and the Czech Republic, tells the harrowing story of Alina, a young woman caught in a cycle of abuse who ultimately kills her mother.
Director Doris Tääker brings both technical precision and deep emotional sensitivity to this difficult subject matter, drawing on her extensive experience as a first assistant director on major productions like Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet.” We sat down with Tääker at her home festival in Tallinn to discuss her journey from film school to this powerful TV series, her approach to depicting trauma and violence on screen, and the challenges of bringing such an ambitious project to life in just 25 shooting days.
You started your film education at Baltic Film and Media School from 2010-2013. How did this school influence your directorial voice and choices? What stands out most from those years?
I started film school as the youngest in my class – I was only 18, and for many of my course mates, film education was already their second higher education, so they had significantly more education and life experience. This created a feeling that I had to work especially hard and prove myself. Student projects and short films that didn’t succeed during school felt like grandiose failures to me. That was until Elen Lotman became our teacher, who emphasised that school is the place where you can and must fail, because it’s much better to learn from your mistakes than from constantly successful work.
The feeling that I didn’t have enough life experience for directing stayed with me even after graduation, so I decided to look for work as a first assistant director to see how other directors work from the sidelines and be closely connected to shoots.
Several truths from school have stuck with me, but perhaps most of all Professor Jüri Sillart’s statement: “Filmmaking is a privilege.” This in several senses. First, that filmmaking is not self-evident – you need to make tremendous effort to even get to the point of making a film. Just as it’s not self-evident that after film school everyone will be waiting to hire you for films.
On the other hand, filmmaking is a responsibility primarily to the audience. They give time from their lives to watch your work – so do it properly! Questions like “why?” and “for what purpose?” must be answered by you as an author for each film. Otherwise, there’s no point in burdening the audience with your work.
In 2016, you entered the Kino Eyes European Film Masters program, which included three European film schools. What did such an international environment mean for your development? How did this experience influence your later work?
First of all, I realised that the Baltic Film and Media School is a very high-level film school in Europe. Compared to other schools, we had already made several short films at the bachelor’s level, and we got a lot of practice. At the same time, in most schools, the bachelor’s level is mainly for acquiring theory, and only in the master’s program do they start making films.
Being in an international community was extremely enriching and world-expanding. In my course alone, there were students from 15 countries and four continents. Such a mix of cultures taught communication skills and deepened that same thought that came from Sillart – that I, as a director, must know very precisely what I want to say with the film in order to bring all other creators together for a common goal.
The Kino Eyes program is demanding and those two years were very stressful. In addition to studying, the program, which is created between three film schools, also meant moving to a different country almost every semester and adapting to a new school.
We made our diploma film on the west coast of Scotland on a small island called Easdale. That was also a very difficult ordeal, where we battled with weather and difficult conditions. With the coursemates we made the diploma film with, we’re still good friends – those ordeals brought us closer and what I learned most was that filmmaking is one thing, but at the end of the day we’re all just people – creative and sensitive people.
Before “My Dear Mother”, you worked on international major projects like “Tenet”. How did you use these experiences for your first larger directing assignment?
Even after my master’s I continued working mostly as a first assistant director to learn from other directors. In addition to “Tenet” I’d also highlight the series “My Husband’s Wife”, where I developed a warm relationship with director Inari Niemi, whose thoroughness in prep work and ease on set gave me a lot of knowledge about directing.
On “Tenet”, I got to experience what it means to work on a Hollywood project where there can be 300 people on set at once. It wasn’t an easy experience, but it gave me the knowledge that I prefer working in smaller crews where human contact is maintained.
The work of a first AD differs greatly in nature from that of a director. Basically, you use different brain hemispheres for these two professions – as a director, the creative left hemisphere and as a first assistant director, logical thinking and logistics, the right brain hemisphere. Generally in Estonia, you’re used to immediately pumping the brakes on overly ambitious creative ideas because you know there aren’t resources – meaning time or money – anyway. But when you’ve experienced different solutions in practice, both technical and creative, they give tremendous knowledge and courage to experiment even with limited resources. Such experience reduces false shame, like “but we can’t do that anyway,” and forces more inventive thinking.
The director’s profession is also one of the loneliest – you make various creative decisions alone at your desk. It’s very easy to forget those ideas only in your head. But from assistant work comes a strong system for how to communicate these ideas to different departments continuously to avoid mistakes and miscommunication. This is something I’m still learning, but a strong foundation from assistant work is already there.
You directed the comedy series “Alo” in 2018 – with relatively light, humour-focused stories. How did you decide to move toward the dramatic, tense and heavy themes in “My Dear Mother”? What about this script captivated you so much that you wanted to make it?
“My Dear Mother” reached me when the script was almost already finished. So it wasn’t my conscious choice to try something after “Alo” that’s in a different genre or with a darker tone. But in this story, I was immediately captivated by the great contradictions (a daughter kills her mother) and the challenge to believably show environments I hadn’t grown up in myself.
With Alina’s mother, Renata’s character, a judgment-free approach was a very big challenge, but in collaboration with psychotherapist Kait Sinisalu we took Renata’s soul apart down to the finest details and found humanity.
In this story, I saw great potential to show the television viewer a world that exists next to us constantly. To show pain points in society through a sense of injustice and breaking down prejudices. To break down the viewer’s prejudices, showing violence on screen was also necessary and justified.
Because of this story, I’ve also delved deeper into problems affecting Estonian society, like the abundance of intimate partner violence, and kept an eye on the birth of the consent law bill. Kait Sinisalu says very aptly in her Postimees article that “harsher rules still apply to women in life than to men.”
I feel a need to examine these themes because I’m a woman myself, but I’m also a mother to a young daughter. This may sound idealistic, but there’s still hope that by telling stories you’re trying to create a better world for your children.
How do filming approaches differ between comedy and tragedy? What new things did you have to learn for psychological seriousness and sensitivity?
My principle is that comedy must be made deadly seriously so that afterwards the viewer finds it funny, and vice versa – dark themes must be directed so that good humor is maintained on set, which supports the crew and actors. Otherwise after this project’s shoots we all could have ended up in treatment facilities because of the darkness of the themes.
For psychological seriousness and sensitivity, it’s necessary to make the themes as clear as possible for yourself through extensive prep work. For this, we found opportunities to involve as many consultants as possible.
In selecting actors, I tried to sense who would become my unwavering companions who would dare to dive headfirst into dark themes, to embody these characters as truthfully as possible. I also chose colleagues for the crew with whom I’d worked before and knew we could honestly and trustingly delve into life’s dark sides.
“My Dear Mother” uses a full spectrum: traditional investigator scenes, dreamlike close camera positions on faces and hands, drone shots over roads. How was this visual approach chosen? What was the inspiration?
“My Dear Mother” tells Alina’s story from many sides, and since the story jumps a lot into the past through different characters’ memories, I first tried to start from the method “, through whose eyes are we seeing this memory? Who is the protagonist of this scene?” We analysed these scenes with this method together with cinematographer Madis Reimund at the script level, and from this, a quite functional and consistent system emerged for how to film different scenes.
The challenge was also how to visually convey to the viewer those institutions that analyse one individual’s – Alina’s – story. One continuous thread was to follow how documents touching Alina’s story travel from one briefcase to another: from the police investigator’s briefcase to the prosecutor’s desk, with the prosecutor’s briefcase to the courtroom, and how it later emerges that information leaks from the police to the press, which in turn influences the judge’s decision through media pressure. That is, to show the anatomy of forming (pre)judgments.
We drew inspiration for this from various Nordic noir series. One of my favourites is the Danish series “Borgen”, which has skilfully managed to visualise the relationship between politics and journalism.
How did you achieve that the visual style reflects Alina’s personal story and her inner world? How are her psychological struggles reflected in camera movement and compositions?
With Alina’s character, it was very important that she didn’t seem like a hopeless case from the beginning, so a guiding motif in the opening graphics became that Alina could have been a very talented artist. She drew skilfully – this was a skill her father, whom she missed very much, had taught her. With Alina’s character, we even made a timeline of how her drawings change at different life stages: as a child she draws many mermaids; after the first rape her drawings become aggressive and erotic, reflecting her self-image and self-esteem as a sexual object; at the end of the story she mainly draws landscapes that come from her childhood summer cottage and bright memories.
What fascinates me most about Alina’s character is her ability to survive. Together with Kait Sinisalu I studied the dissociative self-defense mechanism. Alina uses this often, for example as a prostitute with her clients – her attention floats away from what’s happening to her to some imaginary world. I tried to convey this dissociative camera work and poetics by switching off scene sounds and focusing on some abstract objects in the space. Such a dreamy and dreaming nature is partially the only reason Alina survived.
I also wanted to make Alina’s character as physically perceptible as possible to the viewer through music. Composer Sten-Olle Moldau asked actress Doris Tislar to sing in all the notes so that we created a keyboard from her voice. In scenes where Alina is anxious or in a state of tension, there’s music created from her own voice. All this in the hope that it will start resonating at such a primal level in the viewer and creates a physical state of anxiety in them too. If you prick up your ears, the viewer might hear that there’s actually a young woman’s voice in the music.
Looking at the series’ overall imagery – are there specific colours, use of light that you used to address Alina’s dysfunctional family and her torment?
True to Nordic noir, the colour saturation is generally turned quite low. The purpose of colours was to convey different eras in which we tell Alina’s story: childhood was in warm, bright tones; teenage years with the first groomer and drugs had a greenish-blue undertone. The inspiration for this was the series “Ozark”. The fewest colours were in the final stage of the story, the period before the mother’s killing.
In terms of colours, it was very important that mother Renata’s character was always in red clothes and wore a lot of gold jewellery. Red is a danger sign, but also seduction, because Renata’s nature had to seem very seductive.
Together with the costume designer, we drew a timeline for Renata’s character related to the gold jewellery she wears. The further her addiction goes, the less jewellery she has because she’s had to sell it.
How was the collaboration with the other HODs? Is it easy to delegate?
Our crew was small but very dedicated. We also did quite a lot of prep work and research together. For example, in depicting drugs, we consulted with psychiatrist Kaiti Reidlich, who counsels addicts daily. With drugs, we created a table listing different substances. What they should look like as props; what a character using them looks like; how long-term use of different substances changes appearance, etc. This was important for the production designer, makeup artist, costume designer and actors.
With Doris Tislar, we came across a couple of Instagram accounts where they do interviews with drug addicts on the street. I forwarded examples from there to the makeup artist as well. Doris learned facial expressions and body language from there.
Makeup artist Gristina Pahmani’s challenge with this series was of course enormous – Doris Tislar played Alina’s character aged 16-29. And although Doris is very youthful in appearance, it was necessary to create a significantly worse appearance for 29-year-old Alina, who by that time has been injecting fentanyl for two years, complete with scars and pockmarks on her face.
The crew’s, actors’ and my main goal was to try to convey this story’s environment as truthfully as possible. And it seemed to me that everyone gave a very strong contribution from their own professional field.
Your product was an Estonian-Ukrainian collaboration: Zolba Productions from Estonia and FILM.UA from Ukraine. How did this cooperation work in practice? How were their post-production and VFX teams involved in your vision?
The opportunity to collaborate with Ukraine on post-production came during the shooting period, and I’m very, very grateful for it. They participated in sound processing, colour grading, graphics and VFX, and also with the de-ageing method. The Ukrainians took this story with the same dedication as our crew in Estonia, and although we were separated by thousands of kilometres and collaborated only online, you could feel that we were making the same story.
Film UA also became the series’ main distributor, and such an international nature of the project made us a significantly more appealing project and took us from Estonian soil to Berlinale as well.
A 25-day principal photography period is quite ambitious – how did you achieve this?
This is where I think my previous work as a first assistant director helped – I didn’t have an idealistic or overly optimistic vision, but knew exactly what limitations such a shooting period length sets for us.
A conscious decision was made from this regarding camera language, that it’s fast and rough. Cinematographer Madis Reimund is a genius in this sense – he didn’t even have a camera assistant! He chased the characters with the camera while pulling focus himself at the same time. Madis also has a completely extraordinary ability to find shots that tell the story. Poetics were conveyed with technically simple means like slow motion.
Some technically more complex shots like drone shots were brought in to convey the authoritarianism of institutions and they also stand out from the rest of the visuals.
Fortunately, such camera language was also justified from the story’s perspective. If this had been, for example, a historical costume drama, it couldn’t have been filmed this way.
The most difficult was actually for the makeup department, who had to change Alina and Renata’s characters younger and older within a shooting day. We didn’t have time left for making them younger and here the Ukrainians came to our aid with the de-aging method.
How did you make the decision about which moments to use de-ageing for and which not?
It was quite an interesting and novel experience for me. First, we had to feed the AI what Doris Tislar looked like at age 16. Since Doris had played at that age in a series and in one film, we fortunately had material. Unfortunately, this didn’t give the desired result because Alina’s character at age 9-11 is still played by another young actress, Laura Pärtelpoeg. So a casting was organised in Ukraine for models who would resemble the intermediate age between Laura and Doris. The selected model was filmed from all sides and made to play different facial expressions. The AI put together an image from the younger model, and Doris Tislar’s played Alina, making the necessary parts of the face younger. This process was very long but successful. It seems to me that if you don’t consciously watch for the de-ageing, it contributes a lot to storytelling. Alina seems believably 16 years old, and it doesn’t disturb the viewer’s focus on the story.
The series’ premiere was at PÖFF 29 in Tallinn. How did it feel to watch your work’s public debut at your home festival? Did the reaction differ in Estonia compared to other festivals?
Since the series was finished at the beginning of this year, I’ve been eagerly waiting to show it to the home audience. I was very excited and at the same time anxious.
Mainly, I feared that when something is very praised, the Estonian public might start grumbling as a counterbalance. Like with the major production “Rahamaa” (Money Land) that came out as part of Tartu European Capital of Culture 2024, there was this Estonian tendency to complain about how Estonia was shown unfavourably as a nation. “My Dear Mother” has now been to Germany, Romania, Italy and the Czech Republic, and no one has made the connection that it’s only an Estonian story. To generalise, it’s a story typical of Eastern Europe, but actually, such a case can happen anywhere.
When showing at festivals, we were surprised by how engaged the audiences were with this story. If there was, for example, a slightly funnier moment, the audience needed that relief and burst out laughing. PÖFF’s audience also received us very warmly.
How did this project affect your ambitions and future plans as a director? What are you doing next?
Making this series has above all proven to myself that I can handle being a director. I can handle a short shooting period, I can handle difficult themes, I can handle extensive prep work, I can handle directing actors. This might sound too boastful, but for me this series will always remain one milestone.
Currently, I’m preparing a feature film as a first assistant director together with a very talented Estonian director, German Golub. I love AD work exactly as much as director work.
Regarding further director work I can’t specify anything yet. I won’t rule out either drama or comedy. The ambition would be to continue with international projects.
Interview conducted at PÖFF 2025, Tallinn
Editor in Chief of Ikon London Magazine, journalist, film producer and founder of The DAFTA Film Awards (The DAFTAs).
