A grim, personal real-life case inspired Tõnis Pill’s directorial debut, “Fränk.” When the director was a young boy living in a small Estonian town, a person with an intellectual disability died after tragically falling under a train. A rumor quickly spread that a gang of boys, used to bullying the man, was responsible for pushing him onto the rails. “That gruesome detail was my main motivation to tell his story,” Pill tells Variety after screening the film at the Raindance Film Festival. 

A moving coming-of-age, “Fränk” is inspired by Rob Reiner’s “Stand by Me,” Jonah Hill’s “Mid 90s” and Ali Abbasi’s “Border,” and follows 13-year-old Paul, who arrives in an unfamiliar town after a serious domestic violence incident. Struggling to fit in and wrestling with a rebellious streak, the teen makes one bad decision after another, with his downward trajectory changed by the titular disabled man, played by Oskar Seeman.

Pill came up in the industry as an assistant director, with his second-ever feature film credit being as an AD on Christopher Nolan’s Estonia-shot “Tenet.” Asked about what he learned on those major sets that he could then apply to his own, the director says that “major big-budget sets usually carry a lot of financial burden, which usually translates into quite aggressive and unfriendly sets.” 

“Working on these big sets, I mostly learned about how you should always be kind, regardless of the film set hierarchy,” he adds. In the end, we are working as a team, and nobody should feel bad for just doing their work.”

Kindness and patience were extra important in “Fränk,” given that the director was dealing with a cast largely comprising children and young teens. Pill underwent a two-month casting process, going through over 500 candidates. “It was a really enlightening process,” he recalls. “There was also a six-month gap between the short film and acquiring the final funding, and we were very afraid we might lose some kids to puberty, but the movie gods were with us, and all the kids we had still fit the final movie.”

Asked about tackling disability on screen, the director says they have tried to approach it with two things in mind: “First of all, respect for the actual person the character is based on and secondly, we tried not to emphasize too much on the fact that we have an outcast character with a disability, but rather that we have this super empathetic, joy-filling and all around inspiring person who we want to show to the world and hopefully inspire someone.” 

Part of this process was working closely with Seeman to develop the character. “We had extensive chats and, after that, we started to figure out the physical and vocal side by putting him in costume, roaming the streets and letting him stay in character. It was actually quite a tense experience, since we discovered that a large amount of our society is actually afraid of people like Fränk and we actually got into several minor conflicts which needed de-escalating.”

“Fränk” is also a film about male friendship and the mental health of young boys, a topic currently massively popular due to misogynistic movements such as the Manosphere and the Red Pill movement. “I’m happy these sensitive topics are recently getting more and more attention,” says the director. “A thing I missed as a kid was a good male mentor, and this is even more relevant now. With all this recent [Andrew] Tate worshipping, I believe we need to show better and positive examples of men. We have to introduce positive mentors, and we also need to show how these misled children or adult men could still change for the better.”

As for the recent growth in his home country’s film industry, Pill says getting more and more major productions into Estonia is “very helpful” to the industry and crews, but there are still significant financial barriers keeping the Baltic country’s cinema from flourishing. “We have a decaying pool of talented directors who are financially struggling because we don’t actually have that much money to make Estonian movies,” he says. “In a country with a population of 1.3 million, we can only make four or five fiction features a year with the general budget we have, with many directors starving until they finally get the chance to make their movie. I truly hope it gets better soon, because otherwise we are going to lose a lot of stories.”