QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Coming off last year’s all-time spotlight with the Latvian animation powerhouse Flow (Gints Zilbalodis) taking home the region’s first Academy Award, Baltic film continues to march forward with this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s Baltic Film Competition. PÖFF’s home-grown programme reiterates the region’s growing significance on the international stage and consistent high-production standards in the world of filmmaking.
You can read Josh’s full coverage of the Baltic Competition by clicking here.
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The big winners
The big winner of the night was Lithuania with a sweep of the three awards. The Visitor (Vytautas Katkus), a co-production from Lithuania, Norway, and France, won Best Film. DMovies founder and editor called the debut film “a quiet, disengaged and austere endeavour” while conceding “the developments are so subtle that the narrative arc is barely discernible, and the creeping sense of alienation morphs into monotony”.
The Best Baltic Producer for co-production award went to Kazakh filmmaker Zhannat Alshanova for Becoming (pictured at the top of this article), which, for my money, also featured the best cinematography in the category. Alshanova will be a filmmaker to bookmark for future releases. I wrote that “if her first feature is any indication of her inclinations, Alshanova is also a slow and patient filmmaker” and called the film “a remarkable, and very competent movie”.
The last award in the category, for Best Baltic Director, went to Gabriele Urbonaite for Renovation. It’s good to see Urbonaite rewarded for her efforts because Renovation is one of the best films I have seen this year – no qualifications needed. It’s beautiful, poetic, deeply romantic, sexy, and forgiving in the best of ways. It was my favourite film of the category and, apparently, the jurors thought it was well-deserving too.
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Just beneath the surface
A glance at two of the three winners testifies to the growing importance and opportunity for women filmmakers in the three Baltic countries. A Festival highlight for me that didn’t receive any award love, the Latvian adulting-crisis film Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart (pictured above), was also directed by a talented director who happens to be a woman in Alise Zariņa. Women only directed three of the 11 films in the competition (which is still an improvement from most festival competitions), but their films took home two of the three awards up for grabs. If we are lucky, their success will empower even more opportunities for women directors in the Baltics.
Estonian director Tõnis Pill’s Fränk surprised me the most. I had unfairly low expectations from the title and the marketing materials that ended up unilaterally flipped. It wasn’t the predictable, family-friendly drama I anticipated; instead, it was a dark and gruelling tale of the social issues that shape our adolescent pasts. “The script,” I wrote in my review, “tempers its pessimism with an ounce of grace. And, inspiringly, that grace is delivered in near surreption and without the slightest didacticism”.
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You can read Josh’s full coverage of the Baltic Competition by clicking here.
