"Melchior the Apothecary: The Executioner's Daughter" will get its first public airing on Friday, November 11 at the 32nd Cottbus Film Festival, which celebrates East European cinema, in the German city of the same name, located around 100km southeast of Berlin.

Bernd Buder, festival program director said: "Elmo Nüganen's trilogy is an incredible crime story: a high level of production, the films are extremely authentic, exciting, and very modern."

"Estonia produces high-quality original films, which is confirmed by the large presence of Estonian films at this year's Cottbus Film Festival. It is especially pleasing that the saga of the apothecary Melchior managed to bridge the gap between art and commercial cinema – this is audience movies at their best. We are very proud to be able to show the trilogy in Cottbus over the weekend," Buder continued, via a press release.

The Estonian director, Elmo Nüganen (Names in Marble, 1944), will be present at the premiere, and says that the Cottbus audience will be the first in the world to see the trilogy's final instalment, also the first time that the three films will be screened in a row in the one evening, since parts one and two are also to be shown.

"In Germany, for the first time, we will have the opportunity to gauge the reaction of a foreign audience to the second film, and we will likely also screen the third part for the first time ever," Nüganen said.

Part one, "Melchior the Apothecary", part two, "Melchior the Apothecary: Ghost" and the latest instalment are Estonia/German/ Latvian/Lithuanian co-productions.

The trilogy is based on the bestselling novels of the same name, by Indrek Hargla, who is one of the movies' screenwriters, along with Nüganen and Olle Mirme intertwined characters and events from the books in their scripts, making use completely new and exciting twists created for the film.

"Melchior the Apothecary. The Executioner's Daughter" will hit Estonian cinemas on April 14 next year.

Film Festival Cottbus will show 219 films from 28 countries, including six from Estonia, and runs November 8-13.

The first film was seen by 130,000 viewers in movie theatres in its home country, and currently it is gathering even more audience on Telia and Elisa VOD platforms, while part two is now being screened in major cinemas nationwide, and to date it has already been watched by more than 83,000 people.

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