This PÖFF is going to be remembered by those of us at DMovies as the year when the weather we left behind us in the UK was colder and more wintry than the weather in Tallinn, where the average seemed to be between five and minus one degrees, very mild for this time of year. I’m checking the weather forecast over there as I write from the UK, to see that it is warmer still this week, and up to seven degrees tomorrow. Global warming is real, people.
The warmer weather had a strange effect on the festival’s annual tram party – basically, you are marshalled around and ushered onto a tram in subzero conditions, and then on the tram you drink lots of vodka to warm up. Only this year, no subzero conditions as it was much warmer, so the vodka didn’t need to be consumed in massive quantities in quite the same way, so I stuck mostly to the alternative, very pleasant, local alcoholic beverage and consumed a ridiculous amount of gherkins (the only food on offer but one to which I’m extremely partial).
The dates I attended PÖFF this year also coincided with the first day of Tallinn’s annual Christmas market, so on my last day there (where we had snow!) I donned my walking boots and ice treads and trudged out through the snow to look around the town square, consuming a very pleasant non-alcoholic ginger drink and chatting to the stallholder who sold it to me. Everywhere in the world you go, people love movies!
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This year’s Critics’ Picks
These were the three big award winners:
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And so to the ten films in the Critics’ Picks competition. Perhaps inevitably, the selection wasn’t as good overall as last year (2023), although there were some great films in there. I couldn’t get on with the film I was most looking forward to, Fishgirl (Ecuador, Javier Cutrona), which nevertheless received a Special Mention from the jury. For me, there were too many ideas flying around which the film failed to get a grip on, but perhaps I should go back and take another look. It’s supposed to be about memory loss, conjured in its multifaceted images, and the problem there is that, if your memories of the past are receding or incomplete, then the film isn’t going to make much sense unless you can find a way of dealing with that (as Christopher Nolan did so brilliantly in Memento, 2000).
Memory has long been one of the great themes of cinema, and cropped up quite a bit elsewhere. The superb murder mystery The Body (Italy, Vincenzo Alfieri) played around with contradictory flashbacks where some of the characters were lying about the past. Hitchcock came a cropper with a sole untrue flashback on Stage Fright (1950), but director Alfieri pulled the trick off very effectively here. It’s actually the fourth remake of a 2012 Spanish thriller. It’s also a film in which there’s a very real possibility that the body on the morgue slab might not be dead at all, the reason it vanished being because rather than being stolen by body snatchers, it is very much alive.
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Is that body dead or alive?
A number of the above themes ran as threads through the programme. Just as The Body was about a vanishing corpse, Johatsu (Lithuania, Lina Lužytė and Nerijus Milerius; pictured at the top of this article) – named after the Japanese word for people who vanish from everyday society to give themselves a new start elsewhere – was about a morgue receiving a corpse labelled as someone who had gone missing and was still running around somewhere. Meanwhile, the black comic essay on voluntary euthanasia Dreaming of Lions (Portugal, Spain and Brazil, Paolo Marinou-Blanco) – a film of monumental, contemporary significance to viewers from UK, where a bill on assisted dying is about to go before Parliament at the end of the week – had a character who worked as a mortuary assistant and talked to dead bodies (portrayed by actors who were very much alive and talking back). I liked the film a lot, but while not without its laughs, I liked it more as a drama and a serious look at a difficult and complex issue than as a comedy.
Comedy, to me, is the hardest genre to pull off successfully. I’ve lost count of the number of alleged comedies I’ve seen over the years which simply aren’t funny. Although it was by no means my favourite film this year, The Brothers Kitaura (Japan, Masaki Tsujino) – about two brothers who have to dispose of their father’s body following his unfortunate demise caused by a row with one of them – is very, very funny. It consequently managed to cut through all the horse-trading that goes on in juries, where one juror hates the one another adored; if you can make people laugh, you’re onto a winner. The film is another one about dead bodies, in which aspect it was also another film to echo Hitchcock, notably The Trouble with Harry (1955) and Psycho (1960).
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That is not me
The film which won the jury prize for Best Director was yet another to riff on the Master of Suspense. There is a getting out of town driving sequence in I, the Song (Bhutan, Norway, Italy and France, Dechen Roder) reminiscent of the one in Psycho, except that it takes place in daytime sunlight rather than night and driving rain. Yet, the film is much closer to Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) with two central female characters played by the same actress. Set in a very specific Bhutanese cultural context, it’s about a teacher fired for appearing in a sex video, only she didn’t: the subject is a complete different woman who looks identical to her, of whom the first woman goes in search to clear her name.
It didn’t reference Hitchcock as such, but I think the old man would have adored Nobody Likes Me (Czechia, Slovakia and France, Petr Kazda, Tomáš Weinreb), fascinated as he was by sexual personae outside the norm. It’s essentially a love story, but both parties harbour unexpected secrets which, once revealed, change everything. This one is a tough film to write about in that if you spell out what it’s about, you ruin it for audiences. I hope it’s not giving too much away to mention that one of the main characters vanishes at one point, aligning the narrative with many of the other films here.
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Where did you go?
Streets of Glória (Brazil, Felipe Sholl) – a solid drama about a gay man hitting the fleshpots of Rio after his beloved grandmother dies – also explored disappearance, both of the main protagonist and, later, of his lover who suddenly vanishes a third of the way through, in yet another echo of Vertigo as the protagonist goes searching for him.
There was one dud, Hani (Canada, Hou Dasheng), a study of the phenomenon of child brides in China, which I didn’t feel was very good at supplying to its audience the information necessary to tell its story. The rather better Khazak thriller Moor (Kazakhstan and France, Adilkhan Yerzhanov) concerned (again) a character who had disappeared, a film which I suspect plays better to a Khazak – or perhaps a wider Baltic or even East European – audience than to a more Western one. Sometimes, films made in one culture – often perfectly good films – don’t travel well to other cultures.
Most of the films on offer this year, though, successfully reached out to a wider, international audience. If the selection couldn’t quite match 2023’s impossibly high standard, there were nevertheless some excellent films on offer. I hope the UK distribution sector can do better at picking them up and putting them out here than it did last year (and if it could pick up more of last year’s Critics’ Picks entries while it’s at it, that would be a welcome bonus).
You can see the entire Critic’s Picks selection by clicking here.
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