Estonian stunt legend Aldo Tammsaar to be honored by Haapsalu film festival
A veteran stuntman is being honored for pioneering the craft in Estonia at the upcoming Haapsalu film festival.
Aldo Tammsaar, 74, was the first Estonian to work as a professional stuntman in a career running from the late 1970s to mid-1990s, and was also among the Soviet Union's finest stunt coordinators while that bloc was in existence.
He belonged to a six-member stunt team that worked on practically all the major action movies of its era. Altogether, he has been involved in nearly 200 films, including "Ballaad vaprast rüütlist Ivanhoest" (1982), based on the Walter Scott romantic-historical novel "Ivanhoe"; "Must Nool" (1985), also based on a literary classic, "The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses" by Robert Louis Stephenson, and "Mees Kaputsiinide bulvarilt" (1987).
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, he also built a career in Finland, whose highlight was work on "Talvisota" ("The Winter War," 1989), directed by Pekka Parikka, which Tammsaar was stunt choreographer on.
He also passed on his skills and know-how. For instance, Estonia's current leading stunt coordinator, Enar Tarmo, considers himself a student of Tammsaar, having studied at the stunt course of the Turku School of Arts and Media in Finland in the early 1990s, when Tammsaar was one of the instructors. Of the Finns who studied under him, several now work as stuntpeople in Hollywood too.
Tammsaar is also a former elite modern pentathlete.
As if that were not enough, he was also a co-organizer of Estonia's first horror film mini-festival, and thanks to his efforts, films banned at the Helsinki film festival "Love & Anarchy" were shown at Tallinn's Eha cinema on September 27, 1993, namely: "Nekromantik" and "Nekromantik 2," both from controversial German writer-director Jörg Buttgereit, and cult video nasty "The Driller Killer," directed by Abel Ferrara.
In 1992, Tammsaar founded MPDE, a film distribution company which officially brought the first Hollywood films to Estonia, and in 2001, he built Tallinn's first, and for a long time only, multiplex cinema.
It is the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival (HÖFF) that will be granting its lifetime achievement award to Tammsaar at the festival's opening ceremony this year, taking place this Thursday, April 30, at 6 p.m. at the Haapsalu kultuurikeskus in the town center.
The Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival itself runs to Saturday, inclusive.
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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Neit-Eerik Nestor
