Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Hada & The Writer
The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.
HADA (2023) dir. Alex Mañas — World Premiere
During my junior year of college, a co-worker and friend at the campus writing center and I talked about how great it was that nobody had died in three years at our college—a statistical improbability. I commented to her that it was especially great that there had been no suicides, something most American high schools even have to reckon with. A third person in the room, another student co-worker a few years our younger, piqued interest in our conversation. I don’t remember precisely what he said, though I do remember that he asked when the last campus suicide was. Neither my friend nor I knew.
About a year later, that third person in the room, my coworker and friend, killed himself.
Wracked with guilt, I wondered whether or not that conversation he overheard gave him the idea or influenced his decision to end his life. Part of me wonders how it couldn’t have. This is the predicament of Hada, the directorial debut of Spanish director Alex Mañas, which had its world premiere on Sunday, November 5th in Tallinn as part of Just Film’s International Youth Competition Programme through the 23rd Youth and Children’s Film Festival (a side festival to PӦFF).
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
THE WRITER (2023) dir. Romas Zabarauskas — World Premiere
The risk inevitably involved in small-scale, two-character dramas is always the same: the actors, and the script they play, contain little room for error. In a four-dish dinner, it’s less of an issue if fifty percent of the dishes miss the mark than in a two-dish dinner; despite the fact that the dinner could still be considered equally as “successful,” i.e. a 50% approval rating, the two-course dish is, without fail, going to be less satisfying. And that’s the downfall of The Writer, a queer drama about a one-night encounter in New York City between a Lithuanian-American writer and a Russian-Lithuanian who served together in the Red Army many moons ago. With just the two performances of an overly didactic script, there is too little room for error.
Dima (Jamie Day) reaches out to his former lover Kostas (Bruce Ross), now a successful metropolitan writer, on a trip for a job interview in New York City. The two are optimists in their own ways: Dima is a political optimist who finds something to appreciate in the excesses of liberal capitalism; Kostas is a romantic optimist (perhaps sensualist is more accurate here), eager to convince Dima to spend the night. When they aren’t reminiscing on the golden and touching days of their previous flame, their conversations trend toward insufferable dinner-table politics.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.