Editor

The festival landscape in December is rather lean, but thanks to the Black
Nights Film Festival in Estonia (held this year from November 23 - December
10), it's all but guaranteed to be substantive. One of the most diverse and
well-organized of Eastern European film festivals, Black Nights puts a great
cap on the year by showcasing a stunning overview of both obscure titles and
worldwide festival hits, including some of the best reels from Berlin, Cannes,
Venice and Toronto from this year and 2001. It's an excellent place to catch
up on what you've missed, frequenting the cinema on some of the darkest, longest
nights of the year in Estonia - the festival's namesake. Early December has
some of the shortest daylight hours of the year in the Baltic Region.

The festival takes place mainly in Tallinn, Estonia's capital city, with selected
screenings in Tartu and Viljandi, the next-largest cities. It caters to an international
audience, as most films in languages other than English are shown with English
subtitles. Tallinn is a small, comfortable well-preserved medieval city, which
even has some international film lore. The opening scenes to Andrei Tarkovsky's
Stalker were filmed in central Tallinn. The surviving abandoned warehouses
used in the film are now ironically situated near the recently-constructed local
multiplex that shows mostly Hollywood blockbusters.

"One of the reasons that we started the festival was that most of the
functioning cinemas in Estonia are showing mostly American films," commented
Festival director Tiina Lokk."Of course this is quite a usual situation
for each European country but here it was an extremely high percentage, it was
around 97% American films on the market. I don't have anything against this,
but I like to have palettes in everything. I was working for a distribution
company before, and when we started, in '93, the situation was even better because
if a journalist wrote about films, then cinema was in the newspapers in the
cultural department. Now you can see articles about the cinema only in the entertainment
department. As a film critic, I don't like that we're losing the art part of
the cinema, art and auteur films."

The main feature program which began November 29 after the student film segment,
opened with Tom Tykwer's Heaven, with co-screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz
(who collaborated the deceased Krzysztof Kieslowski on the script) in attendance.
The program continued with such intriguing and varied titles as Pan Nalin's
Samsara, Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy and Kim Ki-Duk's Address
Unknown. There was also a sizable contingent of critically-acclaimed films
from 2001, with Werner Herzog's Invincible and Larry Clark's Bully
(which had premiered in the region, just across the water in Helsinki, Finland
at last year's Love and Anarchy festival) among the strongest of these.

The most notable regional fare of the times Elmo Nüganen's Names in
Marble, an Estonian-Finnish co-production and the first film since 1930s
to be released theatrically at the same time in Finland and Estonia. The story
concerns schoolboys who fought for Estonian independence and was lensed by Russian
cinematographer Sergei Astakhov (Brother, Of Freaks and Men). While included
in the festival catalogue, much to the chagrin of foreign festival attendees,
the film was not screened in the festival proper, the reason being given that
it was already being commercially distributed in Estonia. Indeed, it was playing
at the multiplex in front of the Tarkovsky film set mentioned earlier.

Black Nights features a retrospective every year, and these have ranged from
the iconic to the unusual - what with Carl Dreyer in 2000 and Hammer horror
films last year. This year, the festival looked back on the fruitful career
of Icelandic filmmaker Fridrik Thor Fridriksson. Fridriksson is a Black Nights
veteran - he accompanied his film Angels of the Universe at the 2000
festival and remarked this year that he liked coming to Estonia - "I always
feel at home here."

His latest offering, Falcons stars Keith Carradine as a middle-aged
ex-con who briefly spent time in Iceland in the '60s and decided to return,
vying for a change of scene and a place where (almost) nobody knows him. Fridriksson
shows himself to be slightly influenced by Wim Wenders in this and his other
films. Falcons starts out as a relocation drama but ends up as a road
movie, and even has some echoes of Wenders' American Friend, what with cowboyish
Carradine with a hand-held tape recorder to keep him company, running off to
Hamburg with his new flighty Icelandic girlfriend in a romantic, but ultimately
doomed quest for a new life, to be jumpstarted by the sale of a falcon smuggled
out of Iceland.

The Wender's connection is further seen in one Fridriksson's pet themes, the
Americanization of Iceland, much in the same way as Wenders' '70s-era oeuvre
explored the Americanization of Germany. The use of cameo appearances by actors
Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander in Fridriksson's films is another connecting thread.
Ganz reprises his role as the angel Damiel from Wings of Desire, coming
to take a dying character away to heaven at the end of Children of Nature,
Fridriksson's breakthrough 1991 effort, which earned him a Best Foreign Language
Film Oscar nomination. Sander is employed in an altogether different light,
playing a demon who asks the boy protagonist of Movie Days where the
local church is. The retrospective continued with Fridriksson's 1981 time capsule
rockumentary Rock in Reykjyavik, which featured a riveting tableau of
Icelandic rock bands, most of them obscure, with the notable exception of a
very young Björk (star of Dancer in the Dark, the Black Nights opening
night film in 2000) playing with her old band, the Sugarcubes.

Stern-looking British actor Christopher Eccleston, while not present in person
at the festival, was all over the place, featured in three films: the Danish
production from director Ole Bordenal I Am Dina, Alex Cox's futuristic
Elizabethan vengeance drama Revenger's Tragedy and a last-minute premiere
(which replaced the original closing night selection of the Estonian film Made
in Estonia) of Danny Boyle's new film 28 Days Later, a post-apocalyptic
plague parable scripted by Alex Garland, author of the screenplay to Boyle's
disappointing The Beach. 28 Days Later has its grisly and powerful
moments, but is ultimately as much of a let-down as The Beach. Full of plot
holes and derivative of such '70's sci-fi horror B-movies as The Omega Man
and Dawn of the Dead, the film has an impressively atmospheric opening,
but peters out as it approaches its denouement. Eccleston plays Major Henry
West, a career soldier with his own convictions on how to survive the ecological
catastrophe. The film will have its U.S. premiere at Sundance next month.

Revenger's Tragedy decidedly unpretentious, cartoonish aesthetics were
the perfect antidote to another updated revenge tragedy in the festival program
- Mike Figgis' Hotel, hopelessly turgid rending of "The Duchess
of Malfi." The latter film's only redeeming feature was its interesting
cast (David Schwimmer, Julian Sands, George DiCenzo, Salma Hayek) and anything
with Saffron Burrows in it can't be all bad.

The festival's Audience Award (in the form antique storm lantern) went to Pedro
Almodovar's worldwide hit Talk to Her, starring Argentine heartthrob
Dario Grandinetti, a veteran of several Eliseo Subiela films (The Dark Side
of the Heart, Don't Die Without Telling Where You're Going, Wake Up Love).
Estonia critics lauded Peter Mullan's intensely emotional Venice Golden Lion-winner
Magdalene Sisters with an award from the Estonian Film Journalists' Association
in the form of a glass sculpture by Ivo Lill. The festival also has an international
animation segment, and the top award for Best Animation film went to Pjotr Sapegin's
Aria, a Norwegian-Canadian co-production and a touching rendering of
the Madame Butterfly story.

This year's programme featured a large contingent of Russian films. One would
hope that the Russian film industry is experiencing something of a revival,
and Black Nights has always had a well-selected Russian section, but most of
the Russian fare this year was lackluster, with Andrei Konchalovsky's overrated
Venice jury grand prize-winner Dom Durakov and highly pretentious intellectualized
swill such as Yekaterina Kharlamova's Memorabilia: A Collection of Memorable
Things. Luckily, Konstantin Murzenko's spunky Russian crime comedy-drama
April (which had its world premiere at this year's Belinale) saved the
day with its gentle, ironic sensibility.

While Black Nights is still a young festival, and suffers from a bit of an
inferiority complex when it comes showing local fare (none of the Estonian films
were shown with benefit of English translation) but it has much potential as
the regional film industry develops. More Western foreign press are starting
to take notice.

Kirill Galetski