Kaljo Nikker (September 30, 1928 – May 1, 2007) was an Estonian lighting engineer, who worked for Tallinnfilm.
16-year-old Mari, raised without a mother by a drunkard father, is put in an orphanage which she immediately, though unsuccessfully, tries to flee from. The sensitive Mari finds it hard to adapt to the coarse manners and brutal games amongst the children. Only gradually does she develop a sense for the similarly difficult fates of her fellow sufferers, who have long forgotten how to cry. She even falls in love for the first time, not with her self-appointed “protector” Tauri, but with the rough-mannered Robi.
In post-World War II Estonia, Mait Kukemeri, an activist of the Young Communist League arrives to the Metsa collective farm in the back of a traveling cinema truck. As a commissary of the spring sowing, he has orders to usher all the people to the field, even if the water is high enough to soak your boots and the machines sink in the mud. Harald Tuvikene, the head of the farm, keeps dragging his feet, trying to pitch his peasant wisdom against the senseless demands of the central power. For the first time in his life, Kukemeri faces a real problem - does he do what's right or does he follow the party's inept commands in order to further his own career?