Lioness

Liina
Triškina-Vanhatalo

LIINA TRIŠKINA-VANHATALO (born 1976) studied humanities at the University of Tallinn and started her film studies in 1998 at the European Film College in Denmark, followed by the Film and Audiovisual School of Catalunya. Her main interest was documentary filmmaking. Since then she has worked on dozens of documentaries, as a director and editor. She has also taught editing at the Baltic Film and Media School. In parallel with documentaries, she started to work as script-continuity for fiction features and on 2016 ended up writing her own first script to reach the screen, the social drama “Take It Or Leave It”. The film premiered in October 2018 at Warsaw IFF. It was selected as the Estonian submission for the Academy Awards (Best Foreign Film). „Lioness“ is her second feature.

Helena, a skilled paramedic, is powerless when her teenage daughter Stefi spirals into a dangerous life of drugs, violence, and cyberbullying. Desperate, Helena plans to secretly kidnap and isolate Stefi at their old summer house, hoping to save her. But things don't go as planned. An unexpected chain of events throws Helena into shock, forcing her to confront her own emotional failures and redefine what motherly love truly means.