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Est. 2020 | Tallinn, Estonia
Est. 2020 | Tallinn, Estonia
Juri Krutii is an Ukrainian-Estonian screenwriter and director working between Tallinn and Los Angeles. A graduate of Screen Academy Scotland with a Master of Fine Arts degree, his work explores youth, power, and fragile identity, often through immersive, character-driven storytelling that invites a visceral and emotional response from the viewer.
Juri's films have screened internationally at major festivals, including Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF), Glasgow Short Film Festival, Underwire Film Festival, and Riga International Film Festival. His short film Keyhole, funded by the Estonian Film Institute, premiered at PÖFF Shorts in 2023 and continued its festival run across Europe and the United States. His earlier short Eudaimonia (2018) screened widely, while his music video Kassikontsert — King of Color (2024) was selected for Riga IFF and Prague Film Festival.
Alongside his narrative work, Juri is currently directing a four-year documentary project focusing on disenfranchised children in Estonia, and developing his first narrative feature film. With professional experience across both the UK and Estonian film industries, he frequently works as an assistant director on narrative and commercial productions throughout the Baltics and the United States, bringing a strong foundation in set leadership, collaboration, and craft to all aspects of his filmmaking.
Todd Richter is an American photographer working in Tallinn. His work spans film sets, fashion campaigns, album art, and fine art documentation across the US and Europe. Recent clients include Woolish, WET Swimwear, and Kanuti Gildi SAAL, among others. His most recent commercial project featured goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois.
He studied Photography, Documentary Film, and Theater at Kalamazoo College, then spent his early 20s documenting the restless energy of Midwestern life between Chicago and Michigan: basement shows, buggy summers and bonfires, strip malls, shipwrecks and sand dunes, cornfields, county roads and church steeples.
After moving to Scotland and dabbling in academia for a few years, completing an MSc in Information and Library Studies and PhD research in metacognitive learning, he began collaborating with director Juri Krutii and working as a unit stills photographer in the Scottish independent film community.
The camaraderie and immersion of working on a film set hooked him, and the blend of documentary and theater he was trained in turned out to be the foundation for everything since. Together with Juri, he co-founded Pensive in Tallinn, where he collaborates frequently with local artists across visual mediums. The through-line across all of it has never changed: a communal effort, somewhere between controlled and reckless, where there's room for something to happen that nobody planned.
