The 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF)

The only International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) A-list film festival in Northern Europe or the Baltic, Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival just wrapped up its 27th year and celebrated by breaking all major attendance records from the festival’s history, as PӦFF director Tiina Lokk-Tramberg shared at the closing ceremony. The programming integrally elevated the consistently underappreciated Eastern European cinema scene, specifically Baltic and Balkan cinema. An emblem of this was the festival’s opening selection, the Serbian Oppenheimer titled Guardians of the Formula, and in the inclusion of three programs for these regions: the Baltic Film Competition, Focus: Serbia and South East European Neighbours, and a retrospective on the Yugoslavian Black Wave.

From 3-19 November 2023, PӦFF27 screened 185 feature films from 73 countries (with an additional 51 feature films presented alongside the main programming through the Youth and Children sub-festival Just Film). The programming included 51 world premieres and 24 international premieres, most of which were shown in the heart of the capital of the Baltic region’s northernmost country. The festival had a decidedly non-Hollywood flare to it, which contributes to its annual neglect at the pens of major North American film publications. (I was one of only two critics who traveled from the United States for the festival, which shares the same accreditation as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice. I don’t believe any Canadians made the trip[1] .) But it’s also what makes it interesting.

I was most struck by the degree to which Black Nights felt like a national event. The President of the Republic of Estonia, Alar Karis, gave a speech and presented an award at the closing ceremony, a gesture of support that makes me wonder what it would be like for Joe Biden to attend Sundance or Justin Trudeau to put the full weight of the Canadian government behind TIFF. Would such political support, even at the gestural level, push a change in the pitiful Marvelized palette of the North American audience? The local Tallinn audience, which did the heavy lifting in breaking the attendance records, showed up in droves for obscure titles late at night. A few of my planned public screenings filled before I purchased my tickets, a process I began just a few hours after they announced the full competition program. I met a few cinéastes who traveled from countries near and far to attend the festival for their fifth, tenth, or even twentieth time (one woman living in Germany, whom I shared a ride to the airport with, had been around since the first festival!)

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Containing reviews for: Twittering Soul 3D; Mo Mama; The Waves, The Sand, and Two Lovers in the Middle Of…; Crows; Five and a Half Love Stories in an Apartment in Vilnius, Lithuania