QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This is our eighth year at the only a-list accredited festival of Northern Europe, and our coverage has become broader than ever. In total, we published 146 pieces over the course of two weeks, including exclusive reviews of all of the films in the top seven competitive strands. Each one of these sections was assigned to an individual journalist (except for the Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition). These sections are listed below (just click on the title in order to accede to each individual archive, containing all of the respective pieces, verdict pieces and interviews – where available).

• Main Competition (17 films) – Victor Fraga (this humble editor and writer of yours);
• First Feature Competition (13 films) – Paul Risker;
• Critics’ Picks (10 films) – Victoria Luxford;
• Rebels with a Cause (10 films) – Antol Bitel;
• Baltic Competition (11 films) – Joshua Polanski;
• Doc@PÖFF International Competition (10 films) – Eoghan Lyng;
• Doc@PÖFF Baltic Competition (12 films) – various writers; and
• Just Film (just two films covered).

In addition we also published:

• Six in-depth industry pieces;
• 31 reviews from the Best of Festivals section (mostly republications of movies viewed earlier this year in other film festivals); and
• 12 reviews of short movies from PÖFF Shorts section, and written as part of our Film Review Workshop (run by this writer on site, on November 9th).

And you can click here in order to read all 146 pieces (from the various sections above, and more).

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The winners, and our dirty favourites

Below are the big winners from the Main Competition:

• Best Production Design: Chris Richmond, David Hand of Think of England (Richard Hawkins; pictured at the top of this article);
• Best Original Score: Erdem Helvacıoğlu of LifeLike (Ali Vatansever);
• Best Script: Ståle Stein Berg of No Comment (Petter Næss);
• Best Cinematographer: Yutaka Yamazaki of The Imaginary Dog and the Lying Cat (Yukihiro Morigaki);
• Best Actor: Aladdin Detlefsen, Kanji Tsuda for The Frog and the Water (Thomas Stuber);
• Best Actress: Kiara Arancibia for The Good Daughter (Júlia de Paz Solvas; pictured above);
• Best Director: Ali Vatansever for LifeLike; and
• Grand Prix (event’s top prize): The Good Daughter.

The biggest winner of the evening was undoubtedly Júlia de Paz Solvas’s humanistic and very gentle drama The Good Daughter. about a teenage girl enchanted and scared of her narcissistic and manipulative father. The story is set in Catalonia (this year the autonomous region of Spain was the Festival’s “focus country”). In addition to taking home the Grand Prix and the Best Actress prizes, The Good Daughter also snatched the Audience Award (in one of those rare occasions where the public agrees with the jury).

Turkish drama LifeLike, about a young man terminally ill with cancer, and who finds comfort and affection in VR devices, also received multiple recognitions. Ali Vatansever and his film won Best Director and also the Best Original Score prizes.

My personal dirty favourite, an unusual genre addition to the event’s main strand, left empty-handed. Raymond St-Jean’s Veins is a perfectly ambiguous horror movie about plants and mortality, set in Francophone Canada. A movie guaranteed to leave St Jean’s fellow horror master and countryman David Cronenberg chlorophyll-green with envy. Another film to leave without any prizes and deserving of a mention is Abu Bakr Shawky’s The Stories, a heartwarming drama in which the Egyptian director intertwines personal stories with his country’s history.

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Click here in order to read our individual reviews of the all movies above, and the remaining entries in the Main Competition section.