Every November, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival embraces the cold of the coming winter, Estonia’s capital shining bright in the darkness of night, showcasing the latest the Baltics and beyond can offer. Each year, for over two weeks, the annual festival, now in its 27th year, offers up hundreds of features and shorts presenting them to both the international press and the cinema-going public. Nearly ten years ago, the festival was awarded A-class status, which puts it alongside the likes of Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Karlovy Vary, Warsaw, and San Sebastian. For the past few years, we’ve been invited along to sample its many delights.This year, the festival played host to 185 feature films from 73 different countries, including 51 world premieres and 24 international premieres, distributed among 5 competitive programmes and 14 side programmes.
Black Nights Film Festival Artistic Director Tiina Lokk Proceeds With Optimism: ‘We Are Joined Together in Our World With All Our Problems’
01.11.2023 - 14:43 / variety.com
John Bleasdale Guest Contributor As the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, prepares for its 27th edition, Variety spoke with artistic director Tiina Lokk about its ambitions and coming highlights. “If you see the festival like a big building, then all the walls are in and the building is ready, but some rooms are not furnished yet,” Lokk says, before adding philosophically.
“I don’t believe that festivals can ever be completely ready. Because at the moment when I say, ‘Yes, now everything is ready,’ I’ve become like a stone and festivals, like show business in general, have to be always in the moment, changing.” Tallinn boasts an impressive program this year featuring 117 world and international premieres.
The opening film “The Guardians of the Formula,” directed by Dragan Bjelogrlić, is a co-production featuring a number of countries which are part of the “Focus” program, highlighting work from Serbia and South East Europe countries, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. There is also a retrospective of the Yugoslav Black Wave cinema from the 60s and 70s, featuring radical and darkly humorous critiques of the prevailing socialist society.
The main competition gathers a diverse range of titles from Emma Dante’s (“The Macaluso Sisters”) third feature “Misericordia,” to Mexican director Jorge Cuchi’s #metoo drama “Bad Actor.” Canadian filmmaker Karl R. Hearne’s “The G” stars Dale Dickey as an elderly alcoholic who turns to revenge after being targeted by a corrupt guardianship process.
Politics are inescapable as Ukrainian director Ivan Tymchenko’s “Oxygen Station” depicts the fate of a Crimean dissident in the USSR of the 1980s. Some films are in danger of becoming inadvertently politically
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Emma Dante’s ‘Misericordia’ Takes Top Prize at the Black Nights Film Festival
John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Italian writer-director Emma Dante’s “Misericordia” has won the top prize at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. Adapted from her own play, her third feature tells the story of a young man (Simone Zambelli) with learning difficulties, cared for by a group of sex workers on an island, protecting him from the cruelty of his abusive father. It’s a raw portrait of a marginalized group of people, mixing natural beauty of the locations with the grime of everyday existence.
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