Leida Laius

Leida Laius (1923-1996) was an Estonian filmmaker. Born and raised near St Petersburg, she moved to Tallinn after the war where she worked as a food inspector, architectural official, and trained as a stage actor before beginning her film career at the state studio Tallinnfilm in 1960. She trained as a director in Moscow. In 1995, a year before her death, she was honored by the Estonian Cultural Foundation with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Laius’s films are notable for their fine work with actors and their attention to the experiences of Soviet and Estonian women, including motherhood, marriage, and sexuality. She also explored the lives of outsiders within the Soviet system, for instance ex-convicts (in A Stolen Meeting, 1989) and delinquent children (in Smile at Last, 1985).