Elmo Nüganen

Elmo Nüganen, the artistic director of Tallinn City Theatre since 1992, is a celebrated actor, director, filmmaker and professor of drama, equally appreciated in Tallinn, Riga, St Petersburg and Moscow. Having started out as a comic improviser in his early career, Nüganen soon turned to classic authors, such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tammsaare. The reviewers have often pointed out Nüganen’s talent of reviving established classics by bringing out their human essence, making them alive and approachable. He has, equally, put on plays by contemporary authors such as Różewicz, Stoppard and Gombrowicz. 
Another one of Nüganen’s trademarks is taking audiences to unusual venues, from staging Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the City Theatre’s medieval lobby to transforming the open fields of Vargamäe into a complex of sets for a monumental joint theatre project dedicated to the five-volume epic Truth and Justice by Estonia’s most treasured novelist, A.H. Tammsaare. 
Keen on Estonian history, Nüganen has directed two war films: Names in Marble (2002) and 1944 (2015). His filmography also includes adapting Jaan Tätte’s play Mindless for the screen in 2006, and a role in the Oscar-nominated movie Tangerines (2013). 
Elmo Nüganen has won the Estonian Annual Theatre Award for Best Director five times since 1993, and received both Estonian and Russian national medals of honour.