Terje Toomistu

Terje Toomistu is an Estonian documentary filmmaker with a background in anthropology. Her work often draws from various cross-cultural processes, queer realities and cultural memory. She holds double MA degrees in ethnology and in communication studies from the University of Tartu, where she is pursuing a PhD degree in anthropology. In 2013-2014, she was also a Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley, CA. Currently she is a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam. She co-curated a multimedia exhibition about Soviet hippies, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.

Getting high in the Soviet-occupied Estonia

Terje Toomistu / October 30, 2017

The Estonian director Terje Toomistu, who recently completed a documentary about the hippie movement in the Soviet Union, writes about the drug culture behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout history, people have searched for ways to induce altered states of consciousness and thus to expand their perception of the world and its meaning. The Soviet Union […]

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Make love, not war – hippie movement in the Estonian SSR

Terje Toomistu / October 12, 2014

In the autumn of 1970, a rumour about a major hippie gathering coming to the Town Hall Square was spread around Tallinn. All the long-haired guys – and there weren’t many of them – got excited by a vision of a cheerful crowd whose social criticism would be masked by the language of rock music and

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