SPOTTED in Tallinn yesterday.

Mixing the mediaeval with the mobile, those thoroughly modern Estonians show that they are masters of multitasking - extracting cash from tourists’ wallets while keeping abreast of the latest gossip…

LAST WEEK I was in Tallinn for a series of interviews, a strange mini-seminar with some very maxi-participants and, perhaps most usefully of all, a chance to simply wander around for a bit.

My first wander took me to a tiny little cinema at the end of the day where I watched Alyosha, a film about the eponymous Soviet war memorial and the 2007 ‘Bronze Soldier riots’. It happened to be about to screen just as I was passing at 5pm, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did. I’d heard mixed reviews but I thought it was a super piece of documentary film-making.

Today when virtually every documentary you see on TV skews off into ‘reconstruction’ and barely-veiled rhetoric, it was immensely refreshing to see a film whose only real authorial technique was the juxtaposition of footage of essentially the same thing - Alyosha - but at different times and in different social and political contexts.

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HE HAD five months to write it and still managed to hand it in late, but at long last we can read the verdicts of Doudou Diene, who as ‘UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ must surely be in possession of the world’s widest business cards.

On 19 March during the 7th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, Diène submitted reports on all three countries. The Senegalese bureaucrat visited the Baltic states from 16 to 28 September 2007, and has managed to produce well over 60 pages of problems, analysis and recommendations as a result. Admittedly though, large chunks of text are reproduced verbatim in the ‘individual’ reports about each country.

A line about each nation being “at a turning point in its history” seems to be a particular favourite, despite the fact that most people would have identified the turning point occuring perhaps 17 or 18 years ago.

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