The first snowfall settled on Tallinn midway through the 25th edition of Black Nights Film Festival, adding extra festive sparkle to a fairy-tale city that already feels like a live-action Christmas card. Despite ongoing Covid challenges, the boutique Baltic gathering made a strong comeback from last year’s heavily online edition, welcoming more than 1000 international guests and screening around 500 films, including more than 70 features that were world or international premieres.
Still at the helm after more than two decades, festival founder Tiina Lokk has made Black Nights in her own image, impeccably Nordic in its homely modesty and egalitarian ethos, but underpinned by steely determination. It is no accident that plucky little Tallinn is now one of just 15 A-list competitive festivals accredited by the Brussels-based industry body FIAPF, putting it in the same exclusive club as Cannes, Venice and Berlin. A few years ago, in her side hustle from running Black Nights, Lokk served as a politician in the Estonian parliament, the Riigikogu. Like the film festival she created, she punches above her weight on the global stage.
Imposed by the Estonian government shortly before festival time, an 11 pm Covid curfew on bars and clubs dampened the usual round of late-night post-screening parties in Tallinn’s picturesque Old Town. But the Black Nights team tackled these restrictions with minimal fuss, providing all guests with antibody nasal spray and festival staff with “Respiray” neck braces that purify the air around the wearer. With these futuristic contraptions on display, the festival’s hub at the Nordic Hotel Forum resembled a surreal science fiction movie at times. Which felt strangely appropriate for the city where both Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) were filmed.
This year’s screening program was dominated by a striking return to classy, classic monochrome. The aesthetic was black and white, even if the political and moral messages came in 50 shades of grey. The Grand Prix for best film went to director Andreas Kleinert’s Dear Thomas, an unashamedly adoring biopic of maverick East German author and film-maker Thomas Brasch, a handsomely crafted reminder that political struggles co-existed with bohemian rhapsodies behind the Iron Curtain. Also winning Best Actor prize at Black Nights, the film’s charismatic star Albrecht Schuch is clearly heading for great things.
Other prize-winners attending Tallinn’s black-carpet premieres dressed in sumptuous monochrome included Francesco Sossai’s hilariously bleak buddy comedy Other Cannibals, which won the festival’s First Feature competition. Emre Tanyildiz also picked up the Best Cinematography award for his luminous chiaroscuro lensing on The List Of Those Who Love Me, Turkish director Emre Odogdu’s wry ensemble drama about a drug dealer serving Istanbul’s arty party set. They may have missed out on prizes, but other notable films using this pared-down colour palette were Liao Zihao’s Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey, a visually exquisite dream-drama about a rebellious music teacher in 1980s China, and Erasing Frank by Gábor Fabricius, a viscerally powerful close-up portrait of a punk singer raging against the state machine in Communist-era Hungary.
Polish cinema with a harshly self-critical edge also made a strong showing at Black Nights. Picking up both Best Director and Best Screenplay awards, Wojciech Smarzowski’s The Wedding Day is a boisterous ensemble drama that examines racism in contemporary Poland through nightmarish echoes of the Holocaust. The festival’s Rebels With a Cause competition prize went to Piotr Stasik’s Moths, an experimental drama about teenage gamers traumatised by enforced internet shutdown, while Aleksandra Terpi?ska’s punchy social-realist rap musical Other People won the independent FIPRESCI prize awarded by critics. Lithuania’s fast-paced thriller Runner, directed by Andrius Blaževi?ius, won the festival’s Baltic Competition.
The lingering scars of Soviet occupation are a recurring theme running through Baltic cinema and political discourse generally. Relations between Estonia and its powerful easterly neighbour have been bumpy since Russian troops withdrew in 1989, but ethnic Russians still account for around a quarter of this small Nordic nation’s 1.3 million citizens, and Russian cinema still holds special significance here. Indeed, the crumbling industrial ruins around Tallinn where Tarkovsky filmed his cerebral sci-fi classic Stalker are now part of the city’s regenerated cultural fabric.
Tarkovsky featured tangentially in this year’s festival, his spirit resurrected in a bracingly avant-garde Austrian opera staged in one of the Stalker locations, a derelict power station newly refurbished as a high-tech arts complex. Black Nights also honoured contemporary Russian cinema with the world premiere of Kyrill Sokolov’s enjoyably overblown kick-ass action comedy No Looking Back, whose sassy 11-year-old co-star Sofia Krugova took home the festival’s Best Actress award, the youngest ever prize-winner in Tallinn.
All film festival programs feature flawed experiments, but more than most, Black Nights seems to be a generous platform for admirably ambitious failures. Films like On Our Way, the debut feature from actor turned writer-director Sophie Lane Curtis, a dreamlike journey through the tormented mind of a young aspiring film-maker, which feels jarringly juvenile as drama but shows great formal daring and stylistic flair. Curtis clearly has a sharp eye and will hopefully make better films than this. Try again, fail again, fail better. Credit is also due to Will Poulter and Naomi Ackie for their committed lead performances in British director Malachai Smyth’s “heist musical”, The Score. Punctuated by soundtrack songs written by co-star Johnny Flynn, this underworld story of love and treachery fails on almost every level but somehow remains strangely compelling, like a slow-motion car crash.
In fairness, some world premieres in Tallinn this year exploded all conventional notions of success or failure, narrative logic or stylistic coherence. One was director Adam Donen’s snappily titled Alice, Through the Looking: A la Recherche d’un Lapin Perdu, a gloriously pretentious post-Brexit parable piled high with homages to Jean-Luc Godard, TS Eliot, Monty Python and more. Lurid, wilfully disjointed and bursting with ideas, Donen’s debut feature straddles the fuzzy border between masturbatory drivel and provocative genius. It is hard to imagine any other festival programming such a bold work in one of its main competition strands, but this is the beauty of Black Nights: a sparkly winter gathering on the surface, a festive feast of mind-bending cinema beneath. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.