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This article explores via John L. Austin's speech act theory the poetic manifestations of three Baltic documentary films: Bridges of Time, The Old Man and the Land and Ruhnu. The aim is to illustrate the way in which the Austinian division between the constative and the performative articulates the meaning-making process in these documentaries. This is done on two levels: on a larger scale the analysis looks at how Bridges of Time serves as a single performative speech act, establishing the Baltic New Wave phenomenon through its own aesthetic style; in a more detailed level, the article examines two examples from the aesthetic movement to demonstrate how they avoid reproducing a given reality by creating a semantic shift away from the surface structure in order to connote a rustic pre-occupation sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]