Whether it’s festival inclusions or even Academy Awards, Baltic cinema is booming — and local audience members are along for the ride.
According to Baltic Films, the three countries produced a combined total of 42 films last year: eight from Estonia, 17 from Lithuania, and 17 from Latvia (including four high-end mini-series). In Estonia, these films accounted for a 13.11% market share, with a 19.54% share in Latvia and a 20.54% share in Lithuania.
This reflects a long-term growth in the number of Baltic films being made, which have increased significantly in the past ten years. According to writer Audrius Dabrovolskas, there has been quite a jump compared to the 2015-2018 period, when only 10 films were produced across all three countries.
State funding also makes up a large portion of the money that goes towards Baltic Films, with €19.675,028 attributed to films in Estonia in 2025 (€1.646,616 from the Ministry of Culture, €3.1 million in Cultural Endowments and €14.928,412 from the Estonian Film Institute), €7.587,871 in Latvia (€6.513,871 from the National Film Centre and €1.074 million from the Culture Capital Foundation) and €11.071 million from the Lithuanian Film Centre.
Considering the €2.19 million needed for a feature film to get off the ground in Europe (this is according to the European Audiovisual Observatory), these funds could enable a significant number of productions in each Baltic nation, even if the were to rely solely on public funding. Also according to the European Observatory, 47% of the budget of European films comes from public sources.
While Estonia saw a slight drop from €19.717,363 and Latvia a substantial one from €8,938,859 in 2024, Lithuania saw an increase of more than 10% in 2025 from €10,053,000 the previous year. Estonia has experienced a plateau since growth of 55% between 2016 and 2021, largely attributed to a generous 30% rebate offered by the Estonian Film Institute; a similar plateau can be found in Latvia, while, on the bright side, Lithuania has seen almost a third of funding increase since 2021.
Despite these local variations and fluctuations, the overall picture for Baltic filmmakers is mostly positive, but vigilance from funders and creativity from directors are needed to keep this exciting trend going.
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The Baltic New Wave
The development in Baltic films over the past 10 years has been so exciting that it has even been called a “New Wave” by Jevgeni Supin, founder of Estonia’s Zolba Productions.
Take the wide variety of success stories over the past couple of years. Latvian animation Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) beat Disney to claim the best Animation Oscar this year, Lithuanian film Slow (Marija Kavtaradzė, 2023) won the World Cinema award for Direction at Sundance in 2023 and Lithuanian film Toxic (Saulė Bliuvaitė, 2024) won the Golden Leopard at Locarno last year. Once a novelty, Baltic films are now a welcome mainstay of the film festival circuit.
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Fostering the future of Baltic filmmaking
There are five components to the Discovery Campus programme: Script Pool for writers, Frame Within A Frame for cinematographers, Music Meets Film for composers, Black Room for art departments and Black Nights Stars for actors. They have multiple partners: E-talenta, International Screen Institute, Law Firm TEGOS (former TGSBaltic), IMAGO Technical Committee (ITC), International Cinema Lighting Society (ICLS), Aalto Studios and Camera Nordic. Funding comes from the European Development Fund.
According to Martina Tramberg, head of Marketing & Communications at the festival, “the goal for them is to come to Tallinn, learn the things they didn’t learn in film school, get tailor-made workshops and masterclasses; but most importantly, create new connections”.
She believes that this will have an influence in the future, “because we are still working with talent from our region”. There is currently a virtuous circle of development across the Baltic region: “People are already looking and are excited about projects from that area. It’s much easier for them to get the attention.”
Chilean The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (Diego Céspedes, 2025; pictured below) and Polish–Israeli Mama (Or Sinai, 2025), both benefited from their time in the Script Pool, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year (the former even won the main award at the Un Certain Regard section). The Script Pool competition showcases five international projects and their teams, with participants invited to attend masterclasses by experts, workshops and events.
Last year’s projects included:
Last year’s winner Kingpins eceived a free trip to the Write Retreat in Mallorca!
Meanwhile, Frame Within a Frame provides mentoring for eight cinematographers; Music Meets Film mentors eight composers; Black Room accepts eight international talents (make-up artists/designer, SFX make-up artists/designers); and eight actors participate in Black Night Stars.
Around 40 talents in total attend the programme each year. As Managing Director, Triin Tramberg, explains, “They have appreciated the open, collaborative atmosphere that fosters connections across different cultures, disciplines, and career stages. Most of all, the participants have valued the personal and professional growth the programme focuses on, helping them gain confidence, build lasting networks, and take important steps forward in their creative journeys”.
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The 50% Rule
The major issue that filmmakers find in the region is that producers need to raise a significant amount of private money before they are allowed to go through the system. For example, according to Sorainen, Latvian filmmakers need 50% of financing available before submitting to the National Film Centre. The same goes for Estonian filmmakers looking for Estonian Film Institute funding. Additionally, in Lithuania, state funding may not exceed 50%. This means that filmmakers cannot rely on the state alone; they need to pull together a variety of sources in order to get their film over the finish line.
As Eeva Mägi, whose Mo Mamma (2023; pictured at the top of this article) was developed at the Discovery Campus and won the Special Jury Prize in the First Feature Competition at Tallinn, points out, there are bureaucratic hurdles in getting these films made: “All these big funding institutions, they want paperwork”.
These complaints are supported by Lithuanian filmmaker Danielius Minkevicius, whose upcoming film Oblivion was presented at the PÖFF Goes to Cannes programme at Marche Film this year, who tells us that, “Sometimes they go for safer projects. If you want to make a real independent film, a crazy film, sometimes it’s hard to get through the financing, even in Lithuania. Because we have experts who are conservative”.
Additionally, there are fears that funding has not kept up with demand in Estonia. As Jaan Laugamõts, producer of the upcoming Pig Slaughter, tells us, “The funding has evolved poorly. Because in Estonia, anyway, the movie budgets are, compared to Europe, extremely low”.
But he is hopeful that necessity breeds creativity: “I would say it keeps us a bit back, but it also makes us capable of using very little money. When you have little or less, then you just have to be clever” in order to “get the most out of the money”.
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A lean success story
This leads to directors finding clever ways to work on a microbudget. Take the success story of Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi), the second in Mägi’s trilogy, which was presented last year at PÖFF Goes to Cannes. According to an interview with Estonian Film Magazine, the film’s production budget was a mere €15,000!
As DoP Sten Johan Lill says, it was “covered by self-financing and the contribution of some private sponsors” alongside post-production support from the Cultural Endowment of Estonia. He continues: “The style of the film was technically minimalistic and documentary-like. The crew only consisted of the director, the director of photography (myself), the sound engineer, and the actors. Such simplicity made it possible for Eeva and I to organise everything in terms of production – we did not see the need to go to a large production company.” A third film, Mo Amor, is already in development and was presented at Cannes this year.
It’s worth noting that Eeva Mägi was a previous Script Pool participant in 2021, where she presented her screenplay Werewolf.
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Independent cinema needs creative solutions
There are two takeaways here. If filmmakers want to get their work made in the Baltic region, where, according to the conversations we have had – the average gestation and development time takes three to five years – they must learn how to get funding from a variety of sources and how to operate on smaller budgets.
Minkevicius says, ” From the start to the ending, it’s a very long process”. To get a film made, “you have to be indie, light and you must compromise”.
The good news for Baltic filmmakers is that funding from other national film funds can step in and fill the gap. And this is borne out by the number of co-productions released in 2024. Of the aforementioned eight Estonian films released last year, two were co-productions; likewise, six of Latvia’s 17 films and five of Lithuania’s were also co-productions. A significant number of these films came from a combination of one or more Baltic countries, with four Latvian-Lithuanian co-productions released last year.
By thinking small and international, as well as workshopping their efforts at film festivals such as the Tallinn Black Nights, filmmakers in the Baltic region can increase their film share in Europe, making sure that this current creative wave doesn’t break any time soon.
Learn more about the Discovery Campus at The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival by clicking here and have a look at the extended deadlines for several key programmes here as the final deadline is for some July 14th, and for others July 15th.
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Initial reporting and quotes collected by Eoghan Lyng.
