QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
While it is broadly clear what constitutes a First Feature, a Baltic Film (or Baltic Documentary), or a Critics’ Choice, the competition strand at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival that is hardest to pin down is Rebels With A Cause. It is obviously named after – and in opposition to – Nicholas Ray’s Rebels Without a Cause (1955), although its name is also something of a misnormer. For while politics obviously go beyond one’s party affiliation or attitude towards Trump, Putin and Wall Street, there are some films in this strand – like Lo-Fi (Alican Durbaş) – which come with no evident ideological agenda, so that you would be hard-pressed to state what their ‘cause’ is. Perhaps better to focus on the word ‘rebels’ – for these are the outliers, the orphans, the films with no natural home, and this is the strand that happily welcomes and accommodates their misfit or outright experimental offerings.
You can read Anton’s full coverage of the Rebesl with a Cause strand by clicking here.
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One common trait?
Perhaps what they do all have in common is an element of transgressiveness, often expressed by the presence in the films of borders, whether literal or more metaphorical, which get crossed. In Leleka (Harald Hutter), a French and a Ukrainian woman cross multiple borders as they journey together from the safety of Paris to the dangers of Ukraine to pay tribute to the war dead, and chart along their way the recurring traumas of the European continent. In Vache Folle (Hugo Diego Garcia, Lorenzo Bentivoglio), a young Spanish war veteran living in an Alpine town dreams, perhaps vainly, of getting away to the coast, and escaping his own damage and self-destructive urges, even as he crosses over from cow herding and butchery into criminality. Meanwhile, crippled with agoraphobia and lovesick stasis, the protagonist of the beautifully lit, highly stylised Lo-Fi (Aiican Durbaş) struggles to get out of bed, let alone cross the threshold of his apartment, even on the day that he is due to move out and leave behind him once and for all the place’s associations and memories.
Both The Megalomaniacs (Spiros Stathoulopoulos) and The Baronesses (Mokhtaria Badaoui, Nabil Ben Yadir) see their female protagonists struggling to break bounds in patriarchal environments – the former pitting a sexually frustrated experimental archaeologist against a pompous, peremptory potter on the Greek coastline, the latter having marginalised Muslim grandmothers put on a version of Hamlet to challenge prejudices against their sex, their age and their culture, and also to defy death itself by sharing their stage with a ghost. The boundary between life and death is also crossed in both Emergency Exit (Lluis Miñarro; pictured at the top of this article) which places a busload of disparate strangers all aboard for bardo, and in MieMie – She Can See (Katsutoshi Furuya), where a young romance overlaps with a multi-dimensional spirit war.
In La Carn (Joan Porcel), a globe-trotting yet isolated dancer flirts with danger as he attempts to cross over from virtual sex meets to real contact in an environment of stalking, online threats and homophobic attacks. The improvised Turn Up the Sun (Jamie Adams) sets its boundary between truth and art, constantly switching sides with its game-playing, imposture and duplicity, before settling on their perfect, harrowing expression.
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My top pick, and the winners
And my personal favourite of the strand, Blindsight (Adrian Sitaru; pictured above) contains physical borders and frightening border checks, as well as more abstract boundaries between life and death, the real and the virtual, as an amnesiac woman travels with her forgotten family on an odyssey that she neither understands nor wants.
The Official Jury evidently agreed, as Sitaru was awarded Best Director for the Rebels With a Cause strand. The Best Picture prize went to Badaoui and Yadir’s The Baronesses.
You can read Anton’s full coverage of the Rebesl with a Cause strand by clicking here.
