She married a serial killer. The prisons where she landed might be safer than her marriage.
In Paradisum relates two disturbing stories simultaneously. The female narrator tells her personal tale of imprisonment as the wife of the notorious Estonian serial killer, Andreas Hanni. Although her story is bizarre, it touches familiar themes that run throughout modern life: the desire to be loved and the fear of being alone. Pille Hanni's tale unfolds over cinema vérité images of life in several Estonian prisons. At times the images reflect in a literary way the events of the narration, yet they are representations and impressions, rather than traditional documentary style footage of the people involved. This opens the story to a more general interpretation, often with unsettling results. The parallel contents reveal, at two levels of story and social organisation, how the bizarre and inhuman can be tolerable and even addictive in the face of our fears.
Direction
Keedus weaponizes vérité ambiguity—real prison footage becomes psychological landscape.
Editing
Jarring marriage of voice and image creates productive unease.
Director
Sulev Keedus
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Released just two years after Estonia's independence from Soviet rule, the film interrogates new national identity through its carceral systems—prisons as metaphor for inherited oppression.
Andreas Hanni was a real figure—Estonia's most notorious serial killer of the 1970s-80s. Keedus's refusal to sensationalize him, focusing instead on Pille's perspective, was controversial at Tallinn film festivals.
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