Film director Rainer Sarnet will be University of Tartu’s next Professor of Liberal Arts

In the next academic year, the professorship of liberal arts at the University of Tartu will be held by one of the most distinctive creators of audiovisual works in Estonia, the film director, stage director and screenwriter Rainer Sarnet.

Rainer Sarnet (born 3 March 1969 in Rakvere) is internationally renowned as a film director for his unique visual style, poetic sensibility, and bold approach, rooted in Estonian culture while also influenced by world cinema. His films do not follow conventional narrative patterns, but instead create worlds of their own, where the realistic and the mythical intertwine. For his outstanding creative work, Sarnet has won the annual award of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Film and Television Award for the best film, an award from the Estonian Film Journalists’ Association, and other national and international honours.

Sarnet has attracted public attention most of all with his black-and-white, ironically grotesque adaptation of Andrus Kivirähk’s novel November (2017) and the documentary The Diary of Vaino Vahing (2022), which combines documentary footage, interviews conducted for the film and fictional scenes performed by professional actors. His kung fu comedy The Invisible Fight (2023), set in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, has become almost a cult film. It has been said that in this film, Sarnet fantasised about the parallel universes that might have existed alongside the official Soviet narrative.

Besides films, Rainer Sarnet has created notable theatre productions, drawing on his experience as a film director. His staging of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which premiered at Tallinn City Theatre in 2023, received several theatre award nominations, and his Hamlet, which opened at the Estonian Drama Theatre in February 2026, has been widely praised by critics.

In the autumn, Sarnet will begin a lecture course “Club Silencio. Magical Theatre”, open to all interested at the University of Tartu, focusing on the birth of an idea and its development into a work of art. He invites participants to reflect on the creative process from both the creator’s and the audience’s perspectives. In his lectures, he will interweave discussions of his own work with those of works that have influenced him. The programme will include the screenings of his films The Invisible Fight, November, The Idiot, and The Diary of Vaino Vahing, serving as a basis for broader discussion about filmmaking, stage directing and the nature of art.

On 19 May at 19:00, everyone is welcome to the University of Tartu Museum for a public discussion, Passing the Word to the Image, where the current Professor of Liberal Arts Viivi Luik will hand over the professorship to Rainer Sarnet.

The professorship of liberal arts was established at the University of Tartu in 1993 to bring outstanding representatives of various creative fields to the university. Through the professorship, a dialogue emerges between academic thought and creative practice, offering students and the wider public an opportunity to experience art as a form of knowledge and self-reflection. Each academic year, a prominent Estonian creative person is invited to hold the position of professor and give a public lecture course. Read more about the professorship of liberal arts on the university webpage.