Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) announces the line-up for Rebels With A Cause, an international competition programme screening 13 feature films, alongside a short films competition that also includes 13 entries this year, split across two programmes. The features line-up includes five world premieres and one international premiere. 

Rebels With A Cause is PÖFF’s showcase for challenging independent productions that offer distinct creative visions, robust opinions and surprising aesthetics, for a discerning and demanding audience. Some are experimental forays from acknowledged auteurs and some are first time directors birthing new styles in real-time. Both feature and short competitions will be overseen by a jury comprised of international film professionals announced later this week. 

Festival director Tiina Lokk shared her excitement regarding this year’s films, their unique viewpoints and their consistent overall quality, “This is a time for out of the box thinking and for creative responses to the unthinkably complicated situation the film industry finds itself in. The film world, at home in Estonia, and particularly internationally, should be looking to these creations and these talented creators, to look for new ways forward and to discover bold, emerging voices whose time has come to be heard.” 

The short film selection contains everything from the ultra-current to the boundary-breaking, from experimental animation works to analogue reveries, created by a similarly diverse collection of filmmakers, established and up-and-coming, and with four films screening as world premieres. 
 
Feature Films in Competition 

Ultrainnocence has its world premiere in Tallinn this November. Spain’s Manuel Arija transitions from a sequence of acclaimed and mind-altering shorts to a fantastical debut feature revolving around two moustachioed men, in a hermetically sealed machine, on a mission to find God.  

Wrath of Desire, from Taiwanese director Zero Chou is also a world premiere at PÖFF: a dramatic melting pot of gender, religion and criminal justice issues. A judge sleeps with the defendant, jails them in the morning and they both live with the confusing consequences. 

Bula from Boris Baum, an alliterative Belgian/Brazilian co-production, takes in everything from bedroom black metal to amazon anthropology in darkly comic style and as a PÖFF world premiere. It’s a journey to the heart of darkness, guided by a shamanic scam artist. 

The second feature from Mexican director Alejandro Guzmán Alvarez, Estanislao, puts a 40-year-old prodigal son, his alcoholic father and a fabric-extruding slime monster together in a tailor’s shop. It’s also a world premiere screening.  

Our final world premiere, Papier-mache, is directed by Russian Vitaly Suslin and presents itself as focused on its real-life lead actor’s every-day life before subtly turning away, toward tragicomic, magically realistic, wish-fulfilment fantasy. 

This Town delves into a colourful rural New Zealand community, exploring guilt and unresolved resentment in earnest, awkward and very much humorous mockumentary style. David White’s engaging and immersive first feature screens as an international premiere. 

Germany’s Moritz Bleibtreu directs and stars in Cortex, a multi-dimensional action piece screening as an Estonian premiere, part of Rebels With A Cause and PÖFF’s New German Cinema strand. A supermarket security guard struggles through nested elevated-genre plotlines and inventive set pieces. 

La Verónica from Chilean director Leonardo Medel is a part film about fame, part social media morality play and part murder mystery, as a footballer’s wife’s life of luxury is slowly chipped away at by doubt and accusations. 

A co-production between Brazil, Portugal and Mozambique, Felipe Bragança’s A Yellow Animal is a tragicomic, intercontinental road movie - crossing borders and genres and having its Estonian premiere at PÖFF after screening in Rotterdam earlier this year. 

Kamen Kalev directs February, a highly-personal fiction feature, with a plot hurtling through the life of a Bulgarian man from childhood innocence to near-death old age. The film has its Estonian premiere at Black Nights this year after featuring in the Official Selection at Cannes. 

Also having its Estonian premiere is Chino Moya’s first feature Undergods. Coproduced between the UK, Belgium, Serbia, Sweden and, PÖFF’s home, Estonia, the film curates a series of near-future fairytale vignettes, backed by burbling synthesizers and vivid dystopian scenery. 

Hailing from Portugal, Catarina Vasconcelos’ The Metamorphosis of Birds is a semi-autobiographical hybrid documentary, fixated on the endless cycle of birth and death and the beauty of constant renewal, through the prism of the director’s own family. It’s another Estonian premiere, after first screening at the Berlinale. 

Finally, from the USA, Adam Carter Rehmeier serves up Dinner in America, a high energy suburban punk rock coming of the age road movie. Darkly - and sometimes rudely - comic, with a side order of mismatched romance, the film was in competition at Sundance this year and features Ben Stiller among its list of producers. 
 
Rebels with their Shorts 

In the first programmes of shorts, Steven Subotnick’s highly experimental Edge is a short, sharp opening before the exceptionally topical Belarusian prison-allegory Zhaba from director Stas Turko.  The satirical Instructions on how to make a mannequin is Luca Arcangeli’s second Rebels short in as many years and screens before well-known Swedish visual artist Emilia Bergmark world-premieres the dryly comic Lucky.  

Peter Strickland’s Cold Meridian is an ASMR dance dream that comes to PÖFF after screening in competition in San Sebastian. The analogue film segues into animation with Milva Stutz’s touching and clever My Dear Lover. Jacqueline Lentzou’s “planet symphony” The End of Suffering (a proposal) is the follow-up to a previous Cannes Critic Week favourite. Finally, Léa Triboulet’s The Last Bee rounds out the programme in a contemplative style. 

Passage, from Israeli director Ann Oren, opens the second section of Rebels shorts: it’s extremely analogue and extremely experimental. Pei-Hsin Cho’s world-premiering animation 30 Days of Shoegazing embraces introversion. Stories Keep Me Awake At Night marks out director Jérémy Van Der Haegen as one to watch – it's a deeply-rewarding short, digging into our hidden desires. Not Black Enough shows Jermaine Manigault’s finger is firmly on the pulse of contemporary America: a powerful and prescient piece of filmmaking. Both films screen as world premieres. Finally, Baran Sarmad’s Spotted Yellow completes the Shorts programme: a playful and reality-bending film from the talented Iranian director. 

 

FILM DETAILS

Rebels with A Cause Features in Competition 

Ultrainnocence (Ultrainocencia), Spain, director: Manuel Arija | World premiere 
Wrath of Desire (愛情殺人紀事), Taiwan, director: Zero Chou | World premiere 
Bula, Belgium-Brazil, director: Boris Baum | World premiere 
Estanislao, Mexico, director: Alejandro Guzmán Alvarez | World premiere 
Papier-mache, Russia, director: Vitaly Suslin | World premiere 
This Town, New Zealand, director: David White | International Premiere 
Cortex, Germany, director: Moritz Bleibtreu | Estonian premiere 
La Verónica, Chile, director: Leonardo Medel | Estonian premiere 
A Yellow Animal (Um animal amarelo), Brazil-Portugal-Mozambique, director: Felipe Bragança | Estonian Premiere 
February (Février), Bulgaria, director: Kamen Kalev | Estonian premiere 
Undergods, UK-Belgium-Serbia-Sweden-Estonia, director: Chino Moya | Estonian premiere 
The Metamorphosis of Birds (A Metamorfose dos Pássaros), Portugal, Catarina Vasconcelos | Estonian premiere 
Dinner in America, USA, director: Adam Carter Rehmeier | Estonian premiere 
 
 
Rebels with their Shorts Competition Programme 1 

Edge, USA, 2019, director: Steven Subotnick 
Zhaba, Belarus, 2020, director: Stas Turko 
Instructions On How to Make a Mannequin, Italy, 2020, director: Luca Arcangeli 
Lucky, Sweden, 2020, director: Emilia Bergmark | World premiere 
Cold Meridian, Hungary-United Kingdom, 2020, director: Peter Strickland | Estonian premiere 
My Dear Lover, Switzerland, 2019, director: Milva Stutz 
The End of Suffering (A Proposal), Greece, 2020, director: Jacqueline Lentzou 
The Last Bee, France, 2020, director: Léa Triboulet | International premiere 
 
 
Rebels with their Shorts Competition Programme 2 

Passage, Israel, 2020, director: Ann Oren               
30 Days of Shoegazing, UK, 2019, director: Pei-Hsin Cho | World premiere 
Stories Keep Me Awake At Night, Belgium, 2020, director: Jérémy Van Der Haegen | World premiere 
Not Black Enough, USA, 2020, director: Jermaine Manigault | World premiere                          
Spotted Yellow, Iran, 2020, director: Baran Sarmad