The Tree of Many Faces

Filmmaker Biography: Johannes Magnus Aule is a director and producer from Estonia. His latest short film was shortlisted for the Student BAFTA, while his other works have achieved success at Oscar-qualifying festivals. He studied production at BFM in Estonia, after which he went to the prolific National Film and Television School in the UK. There he refined his love for genre filmmaking in the directing fiction course. Recently, Aule wrapped production on a short film backed by the Estonian Film Institute and Cultural Endowment, with another short film scheduled to shoot later this year. He also won Best Estonian Music Video for the song “Push It” with artist Nublu.

Film Genesis: The film was born from my love for fairytales. I wanted to take the most archaic form of storytelling and see if I could bring it to life in an engaging and visual way. As we developed the idea, our focus was on creating a story simple enough that visuals could be at the forefront of the storytelling. This was our graduation film at the NFTS, and we had the pleasure of shooting a large part of it in Yorkshire. It was a somewhat odd experience filming an Estonian fairytale in England. We were lucky enough to shoot the project on 35mm, which we strongly believed would elevate the quality of our work and the visual flair of the film. We wanted to make a film for the big screen, to tell a visual story and hopefully capture the essence of the fairytales our grannies would tell us when we were kids.