Best of Baltic at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024

For cinephiles visiting Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, it’s worth a peek outside the cinema. Aside from the cobbled streets and medieval spires of the Estonian capital’s old town – a UNESCO World Heritage site – you can glimpse arthouse and blockbuster locations alike, including for Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi drama Stalker (1979) and Christopher Nolan’s palindromic puzzler Tenet (2020). Tenet’s gripping opening is set at Kyiv Opera House but was shot at Tallinn’s harbourside Linnahall, a crumbling brutalist edifice that was built to host events at the 1980 Moscow Olympics but – unless you’re Nolan – has been closed to visitors since 2010. 

On screen, the 28th edition of the festival offered a rich mix of films from 81 countries, with a strong focus on local and regional titles, 45 of which were Estonian productions or co-productions. The most affecting Estonian feature I saw, Liina Triškina-Vanhatalo’s Lioness, focused on paramedic Helena’s attempts to curb teenage daughter Stefi’s involvement with a Tallinn gang, with the stressed mother eventually imprisoning Stefi in her own countryside childhood home. Triškina-Vanhatalo’s spiky melodrama took inspiration from reports of real-life Tallinn gangs, as the director explained in the company of actors Katariina Unt and Teele Piibemann during an emotional Q&A. Although the film has been on release in Estonia for two months, the screening was packed.

Three works each from Estonia’s two Baltic neighbours impressed, with Toxic, the Lithuanian winner of the Locarno Golden Leopard, offering thematic similarities to Lioness albeit with a grimmer social-realist aesthetic. Abandoned buildings, crummy social clubs and rusting machinery in the mining town of Kaunas form an ugly playground for teenage modelling hopefuls Marija (Vesta Matulyte) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite). They both lack real parental supervision, with Kristina’s dad more interested in getting drunk and Marija ferried off to her grandmother by a feckless mother. Matulyte and Rupeikaite’s believable, amusing performances offer light amid the cruelty.

More fun, if atypical, was Tasty. Director Eglė Vertelytė’s soufflé-light story about two cooks at a socialist canteen who enter a TV show called ‘Let’s Cook Lithuanian’ – think a Baltic-flavoured Great British Bake Off – had charm despite lacking originality. Lithuania’s strongest title was Jōhatsu, a world premiere showing in the Critics’ Picks Competition. Writer-directors Lina Lužytė and Nerijus Milerius’s thriller depicted Vilnius morgue worker Lina’s efforts to locate a missing man after she suspects his widow has identified another corpse as him. Lina’s snooping leads her to the Klaipėda docks and into hot water with gangsters, the police and her own husband, leading to an enigmatic, surprising final shot.

Latvia’s notable trio was just as varied. Writer-director Signe Birkova’s bonkers debut Lotus features a woman named Alice von Trotta (Severija Janušauskaitė) who returns from Germany to an inherited country pile in Latvia and gets swept up in bizarre local rituals and, eventually, filmmaking. Cinematographer Mārtiņš Jurevics and Birkova conjure some startling images that recall the outer reaches of filmmakers like Guy Maddin, the Quay Brothers and Alejandro Jodorowsky. 

The Exalted, which played in competition, was a more linear, comprehensible proposition but nonetheless compelling. Like Todd Field’s Tár (2022), Juris Kursietis’s drama glimpses the life of a famed fictional woman in the classical music world as she is put under immense pressure. Here, organist Anna (Johanna Wokalek) finds her life unravelling when her crooked CEO husband is arrested on suspicion of corruption after one of her grandstanding concert performances. A journalist from Gramophone magazine, alongside close friends and family, joins Anna’s birthday celebrations at her country home, but things soon turn sour. Wokalek’s fraught turn is a highlight among the ensemble cast.

Unlike Lotus or The Exalted, Flow wasn’t making its world premiere in Tallinn, but it deserves continued plaudits. A captivating follow-up to his beautiful Away (2019), director Gints Zilbalodis’s spirited dialogue-free animation played in the Baltic Film Competition. Detailing a wily cat’s attempts to escape a flood and the peril he subsequently gets in with animal friends, Flow counts among the best family-friendly films of the year.

Regional hits aside, German comedy Greetings from Mars was one of the only other titles suitable for families. A charming tale of a young autistic boy’s summer stay with his grandparents, director Sarah Winkenstette’s film would be a useful work to show in classrooms as well as cinemas. First feature competition winner No Dogs Allowed tackles another important issue relating to growing up. In Steve Bache’s challenging drama, 15-year-old Gabo begins a sexual relationship with a grown man he has been groomed by online and expresses romantic feelings for his best friend’s younger brother. A considered exploration of child abuse, Bache’s film makes for uneasy viewing.

Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, which garnered acclaim at Telluride and Venice, is a gripping account of the ABC sports broadcasting team at the 1972 Munich Olympics when Israeli athletes and coaches were taken hostage. The film centres on young producer Geoff Mason (John Magaro from First Cow and Past Lives) and his crew’s attempts to broadcast the unfolding crisis across the world. Even when we know the story – which was also the basis for Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (1999) – the film is tight, fast and features top-rate performances from Magaro, Peter Sarsgaard as ABC’s Olympics broadcasting boss Roone Arledge, Ben Chaplin as operations head Marvin Bader and Leonie Benesch as the team’s lone woman, translator and reporter Marianne Gebhardt.

Finally, two Latin American stories grounded in the continent’s thorny realities are worth seeking out. In Adolfo Dávila’s energetic, tense Violent Butterflies, a teenage Mexico City graffiti artist (Alejandro Porter), whose journalist father was murdered by drug cartels, falls in love with a punk singer (Diana Laura DI). Chilean director Diego Figueroa’s A Yard of Jackals features a man looking after his dying mother living next door to a venue he suspects is being used by the secret police to torture and murder dissidents. Terrifying sound design is used to aggravate his – and our – worst fears.